Richard Andrews is a 23 year old graduate student working on a Ph.D in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and, although he has several attractive qualities, he struggles with dating. He exclusively dates online because he has social anxiety and fears approaching women in real life.

He does most of his online dating on a Tinder-style app called ‘Hookt’ and that is not going as well as he would expect it to go. He swipes a lot but barely gets any matches. In response to his lack of matches, he constantly revises his dating profile to ensure that it is the best that it can possibly be, but sees minimal results. When he does get matches, most times that he sends them messages, he gets no response. When he does get responses, he gets ghosted on most times. Sometimes, he succeeds in getting dates with the women that he meets off of ‘Hookt’. But a lot of the time that this happens, Richard does not hear from them again.

Richard was frustrated. He puts in a lot of energy into his online dating and he gets very little in return. So he decided to do something about it, not just for himself but for everyone that goes through similar experiences like his while dating online. He decided to make an app called ‘Matchr’ to solve all the problems that he had while using ‘Hookt’.

At first he built ‘Matchr’ as his thesis and eventually he continued working on it till he released it as a full blown app. It was a swipe style app like ‘Hookt’ but it used Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to help optimize the dating experience, it’s tagline was “The dating app that helps you date.”

The work of the Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence app was to analyze general dating patterns, learn about the user, and then use the combined information to suggest helpful ways that each user could improve their odds. It also suggested people that it thought would be a good match for the users.

This application became very popular and a great number of the population was using it. In response to its popularity and changes in technology, more features were added to it. Some of these were:

• A feature that allows people to search for friends.

• The ability to interact directly with the AI, with the AI, serving as an assistant.

With the ability to interact with the AI on the app, many Humans started having relationships with their AI.

 

Fast forward 20 years into the future. Most people are in relationships/friendships with AIs from the app. Human-to-Human interaction is at an all time low and most people rely on the AI in the app for social interaction.

Richard is now married and no more the CEO of ‘Matchr’. He was voted off the board when he disagreed with humans interacting with the AI and has since spent his time and efforts trying to get people off the app he created and back to real life dating. He see’s the Human-AI interaction as a problem because that could make the general population slaves to the AI and can give the company an unnecesary amount of control over the population.

He walks into the room where he organized a speed-dating event and, as usual, nobody shows up to it. He stumbles upon a website that can send  videos back in time. He makes a video explaining the current situation of the future and sends it to himself right before he decides to embark on making “Matchr” and tells himself not to make it because he will singlehandedly be responsible for the decline in human social interaction. He also encourages himself to diversify his dating sources so that he gets less frustrated.