Dating Artificial Intelligence
Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd recently spoke about Bumble’s future at Bloomberg’s Tech Summit. She stated that the app would shape the future of online dating by allowing users to vet potential matches with an artificially intelligent copy of themselves. Herd outlines “a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with another dating concierge.” The idea is that one can spend less time swiping through potential matches and more time intentionally honing in on a few people that you might be more compatible with. The “dating concierge” will not only “date” for you, but will offer you feedback as you tell it about your struggles and insecurities.
Herd states multiple times in the interview that Bumble will “win” by leaning into new technologies and aggressively positioning themselves to interface for all types of social interactions. Her hope is that these online connections will bring people offline. I hope she’s right, but I’m skeptical.
Here's an idea: we don’t need artificial intelligence to meet people for us. This is what friends are for. We don’t need artificial intelligence to tell us how to interface with people better. That’s what people are for.
We are biologically wired to learn and grow within a community of people who respond to myriad social cues such as body language, tone inflection, and facial expression. When we seek connection, we seek physical, embodied stimulus from another human being. We learn how to present ourselves and further our social lives by mirroring people we admire.
Someone might want to ask an AI dating concierge why they can’t get any dates because it’s less risky than asking a friend. But where there is less risk, there is less growth, and one can’t expect to have very deep friendships if they refuse to open up to friends about their insecurities.
Artificial Intelligence threatens to atomize and optimize every aspect of our lives from a non-biological standpoint. While AI may prove vastly helpful in some areas such as disease identification and scientific research, AI certainly has no place in the optimization of human relationships. What does it even mean to optimize relationships? Relationships are an end unto themselves, where the reward is a deeper and more whole sense of self from the perspective of a broader community that includes all of life.
Bo Burnham, a comedian and social commentator, has this to say:
“We’re trying to actualize and streamline our social lives and it makes no sense. We can streamline clean energy, that’s great. You wanna streamline tech and things, fine. You wanna streamline how we view ourselves and how we view our friends and how we communicate with each other, you can’t do that. We’re applying like a crazy capitalist logic to our social interior lives, to like our souls. I mean, it’s very weird. ‘Oh, it took 10 minutes to get to work, now it takes 2 minutes because we made this really cool car,’ ok, that’s fine, that’s great. ‘You talk to ten people ten years ago, now you can talk to 1000.’ Oh, wait, wait…we don’t need to streamline that. We don’t need to actualize that part of ourselves.”
Burnham wrote and directed “Eighth Grade,” a critically acclaimed 2018 film about a middle school girl navigating life through the immense social pressure imposed by social media. In a 2019 interview with the Child Mind Institute about the film, Burnham states:
“[social media companies are] coming for every second of your life. That’s what these companies are coming to…it’s not because anyone is bad, it’s not because anyone at this company has evil plans…they’re not even doing it consciously. It’s because these companies like Twitter and YouTube and Instagram and everything, they went public and they went to shareholders. So they have to grow. Their entire models are based off of growth. They cannot stay stagnant. Twitter grossed four, five billion dollars last year. It is in the red. It is unprofitable. It has to get more of you… We used to colonize land. That was the thing you could expand into, and that’s where money was to be made. We colonized the entire earth. There’s no other place for the businesses and capitalism to expand into. And then they realized, human attention. They’re now trying to colonize every minute of your life. That is what these people are trying to do. Every single free moment you have is a moment that you could be looking at your phone, and they could be gathering information to target ads at you. That’s what is happening. So as much as we can have really good conversations and try to humanize the conversations, the mechanism of the business is rolling towards that just because of the market.”
Bumble is traded publicly, just like the social media companies Burnham mentions. When Whitney Wolfe Herd talks about her desire to “win,” I’m almost sure she means what any good capitalist would mean—her company will have more market share of the online dating pool than any other company. As pure as her intentions may be, I don’t trust Herd when she talks about her desire to bring online interactions offline. Her desire to “win” seems much stronger, and will almost certainly compromise those more altruistic values in the name of market share.
As we toy with a superintelligent creation of our own which has the potential to direct all of life, one thing we must consider is how AI should and should not be used. I posit that AI should not be used to optimize social interaction. For that, we need to rely more on biology than technology. The two are different types of wisdom, and as smart as AI can be, what it cannot feel it cannot understand.
