Last week, Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd made a prediction about the future of dating: “There is a world where your AI dating concierge could go and date for you with another dating concierge. . . and it will scan all of San Francisco for you and say, ‘These are the three people you really ought to meet.’ ”
In other words, no more flirting. No seducing. No more risks. No more revelations or surprises. You get all of that information in advance from your “AI concierge.”
And here I was thinking getting to know someone was the fun part.
Wolfe Herd suggests your AI avatar will scan your city to identify suitable partners that you would like. What it would also do, though, is scan other avatars to identify who would like you. In other words, you no longer have to try so hard to be a socially attractive person. The AI will let you “be yourself” and you can passively watch the messages roll in.
What this all offers is freedom from vulnerability, from judgment, from being found inadequate. And then, if the date goes south, you can tell yourself it’s the AI’s fault, not yours.
More than 50 years ago, the sociologists Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett wrote, “Whom shall I marry? The more researchers probe that choice, however, the more they find a secret question, more destructive, more insistent, that is asked as well: Am I the kind of person worth loving? The secret question is really about a person’s dignity in the eyes of others.”
The Bumble founder is selling the fantasy that you can enjoy the company of others without effort. Yes, dating can be tedious. Sometimes you have to crush a lot of rocks to find a gem. But outsourcing real-world interaction to AI will diminish you. You will learn less about yourself, your likes and dislikes. It will make you a less interesting person, and, ultimately, a less desirable partner.
Rob Henderson is the best-selling author of Troubled: A Memoir of Family, Foster Care, and Social Class. You can read our excerpt, “The Three Adults Who Abandoned Me,” here. Follow Rob on Substack here.
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Sometimes I drift off to sleep imagining what it would have been like for thousands of years in small villages of under 1000 people. You see the same people at church (or mosque, or temple, or your stone circle) a few times a week, meet at the well to fetch water. Marriages mnight have been arranged by meddling aunts, especially for the wealthy, but many people would just meet as kids playing together and fall in love. Every interaction would be natural, human, connected in person.
Then some time in the early 20th century, we decided to all spread out thousands of miles. Live anonymous in giant cities, far from family and culture and tradition. We all stopped going to church. So we needed something different -- bars, and clubs, and dating were all developed. Already a messy solution, but at least people met in person, and had to approach each other, with alcohol and dancing to be social lubricants. Now it' been reduced to edited photos, one-liners and inneuendo written by text, never touching or seeing or smelling (smell is extremely important for attraction!) eahc other until you've each throughly vetted each other's social media, job, income, politics, etc. And now computers will be doing even the matching.
RIP humanity.
If the algorithm can actually get smart enough to accurately predict which people are likely to be compatible, that would certainly be better than the current dating app system of the algorithm working to keep you swiping until the heat-death of the universe. This would also be a better future than the rise of AI girlfriends/boyfriends, who just give you exactly what you want all the time, leaving you an emotionally spoiled brat who is only capable of taking—not compromising, resolving conflicts, or self-improvement. With that said, this is also going to make everyone even more of a rejection coward, no doubt.