The Bumble Founder's Prophecy for the Future of Dating and Romance
Some of your desires, especially in romance, resist categorization.
Technology in the realm of sex and romance has been neutral at best. The innovation of Bumble, Tinder, and other apps in the early and mid 2010s briefly opened a window of opportunity, and people who score highly on narcissism, psychopathy, etc. were eager to exploit it. With our frayed social capital and low trust culture, dating apps were ripe for exploitation. Inevitably it was going to be gamed and spoiled by Dark Triad types.
Now trust in the apps has cratered and a new "hack" is needed.
A decade ago, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek suggested that in the future, we’ll outsource sex:
“Romance is maybe not yet totally dead, but its forthcoming death is signalled by object-gadgets.”
Žižek suggested that in this “brave new world, which undermines the basic premises of our intimate life,” people would simply push a vibrator into another sex toy, switch them on, and leave the burden of sex to these inanimate objects. This would thereby allow the two real human partners, sitting at a nearby table, to have tea and get to know one another without the burdensome prospect of sex hanging over them.
A few days ago, Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd suggested an inversion, saying that, “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, the future of dating is having your AI avatar date other people's avatars and recommend the best matches for you.
The "let your AI avatars date each other" has inverted Žižek’s structure. Žižek points to the idea of delegating sex to the robots, so you can be free to authentically get to know another person without the nerve-wracking prospect of sex warping your interaction.
In contrast, the inversion of Wolfe Herd is to have your AI avatar date everyone in your city, which eliminates the “uselessness” of getting to know someone. No more flirting. No playing seduction games. No taking risks to explore each other’s boundaries. No revelations or surprises. You get all of that information in advance from your AI. Now you are free to go straight to the sex. This has been where things have been heading for a while. You used to meet your romantic partner’s parents first, form a commitment, and then sex, a momentous event, came later. Now, you have sex first, form a commitment, and meeting your romantic partner’s family, a momentous event, comes later.
Many people think of “dating” as the difficult work of getting to know someone.
Through this process, though, you learn about yourself. You discover your own likes and dislikes. You often don’t truly know in advance who you really are or what you really enjoy until you interact with others. You are not fully aware of your own desires. Two-way social interaction with another person reveals your own psychology to you.
While AI and technology can streamline the process of dating, they cannot replicate the deep emotional, psychological, and physical cues that come from direct human interaction. The nuances of human emotions. The subtleties of body language. The unpredictable nature of romantic chemistry. These are critical to forming meaningful relationships.
In fact, the possibility of sex might even be what causes you to enjoy the company of someone you might otherwise prefer to avoid. And through that process, you learn that you actually wouldn’t prefer to avoid this person. You might discover that you quite enjoy being around him or her.
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 rock to find a gem. But outsourcing real-world interaction to AI will diminish you. You will learn less about yourself. It will make you a less interesting person, and, ultimately, a less desirable romantic partner.
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."
This helps us to illuminate the hidden fantasy embedded in Wolfe Herd’s statement.
She 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, the deeper fantasy here isn’t finding suitable partners for you. Rather, the fantasy is discovering who would find you to be suitable. It eliminates the anxiety of trying to be likable. You no longer have to try so hard to be a socially attractive person. The AI will let you "be yourself" (which often means being the worst version of yourself). It offers freedom from vulnerability, from judgment, from being found inadequate. If the date goes south; you can tell yourself it's the AI's fault, not yours.
Since the rise of dating apps in 2012, fewer people are in relationships, fewer people are married, fewer people are having sex, and people are less satisfied with the state of dating and romance.
AI-driven dating offers a veneer of ease and comfort, yet it ultimately distances us from the authentic and often challenging journey of human connection. What it really does, though, is commodify the human experiences of love, attraction, and personal growth. It reduces relationships to algorithmic efficiency and convenience.
Relying on an algorithm to filter potential partners diminishes your agency and autonomy in choosing who you connect with. It encourages you to trust machines over your own judgment.
In the season 5 episode of Mad Men titled “Far Away Places,” the advertising executive Peggy Olson delivers a tailor-made pitch to her clients (the food company Heinz).
Despite being shown the exact idea they wanted, they are unimpressed:
This is precisely the issue with AI dating technology.
What you want is often undefined in important ways. Your desire is not fully articulated until after it is already satisfied. In other words, your desires aren’t crystallized until they are fulfilled. You are aware that you want something in some amorphous, unarticulated way. But you won’t know what that thing is until you actually experience it.
You are searching for a certain je ne sais quoi—the unfathomable “something” that makes an ordinary interaction with another person somehow become sublime.
Some of your desires, especially in romance, resist categorization.
The cause of your desire is often some feature or detail or quirk of which you are often unaware. You might even misperceive it as a flaw in spite of which you find your self attracted to the other person.
These attributes can’t be captured in an algorithm. Any time you have a structured system of this sort, there will always be things that elude its grasp.
Any time you are attempting to capture and quantify human attributes, you are leaving something out. You’re leaving out precisely what can’t be represented.
In fact, the very act of asking an algorithm to pierce through you and locate your desires might cause you to lose interest in whatever person the machine ultimately delivers to you. And likewise, when another person confesses their preferred characteristics to the machine and you are the one it identifies, the person may find you lacking as a result of that very confession.
Here is what I mean, from my review of Sadly, Porn:
The obsession with rational-sounding reasons is contributing to the obliteration of love. Why do you love him? “He’s funny, nice, handsome, etc.” But lots of people have those qualities. The magic of love is that we don’t know exactly what is behind it. People don’t want the reasons for love to be explained. But today, we are preoccupied with reasons. Why do you love her? You can’t just say “I just do” anymore. So you start dissecting her to provide rational-sounding reasons, which makes you view her as a commodity, which then undermines your love for her.
This was the issue in the recent Nathan Fielder Showtime series The Curse (I reviewed with Richard Hanania here). At one point, in the midst of a marital spat, Fielder’s character Asher and his wife Whitney (played by Emma Stone) disappointedly say “We’re so good on paper.” This husband-wife couple is similar in terms of education, career ambitions, interests, social class, and so on (Whit converts to Judaism for Asher, common enough for upper-middle-class inter-religious couples). Their AI avatars would have found them to be a compatible pairing. Yet despite their commonalities, they aren’t right for each other, which leads them to undermine one another in destructive ways.
AI dating algorithms hold the promise of a delightful, enticing experience with minimal effort. They lure you in with the prospect of effortless connection and unearned compatibility.
You might call these new AI concierge “solutions” The Gingerbread House.
But like the witch's house in Hansel and Gretel, beneath the sugary surface lies a trap. It will make you psychologically flabby, disable your instincts, and swindle you into relinquishing what remains of your autonomy.
I think you touched on an important problem that most people are not aware of. If someone says something is perfect, you will by definition find it lacking. Because there is no perfect. If someone says they found you the best mates in the entire city, you will expect to be absolutely blown away. But what's more likely is that it'll simply be someone who is good and normal and loving. (Which is rare enough these days.)
Part, or even most, of the beauty is in the surprise. You cannot be surprised or see beauty if you're expecting it. Even demanding it.
Seinfeld told a story about he was introduced onto the stage one time as "the best comedian in the world." And it makes the audience cross their arms and go "oh *really*?" The guy introducing him didn't realize how big a mistake that was.
You can't be funny if people are already demanding that you're funny.
“But outsourcing real-world interaction to AI will diminish you. You will learn less about yourself. It will make you a less interesting person, and, ultimately, a less desirable romantic partner.”
This unhappy state of affairs where people actually think having AI do the human work of relationship-building is depressing. It reminds me of a line from Jerry Seinfeld’s Duke commencement address: “Oh, so you can’t do the work?...This seems to be the justification for AI – I couldn’t do it.”
Rob is spot on about how this is yet another way to distance ourselves from authentic human connections and finally believing machines over our own judgement.