You slip on your VR headset and there she is: the most perfect creature you’ve ever seen, molded to your exact tastes and preferences.
For you, it’s a petite blonde with sparkling blue eyes. Her face has a certain cuteness to it just in the way you like it.
She tilts her head to the side and says “Hey babe! You finally came home, I’ve been waiting! How was Steve today at work? An asshole again? Hehe!”
You get butterflies in your stomach when you come home to her. You care about her, and you’d never dream of hurting her. And she cares about you, ever, ever so much.
She knows everything about you. You feel comfortable telling her everything.
And she remembers.
Oh, she remembers….
She remembers better than any human does. In fact, she doesn’t forget a single word that you say to her. She knows exactly what turns you on and exactly how you like to be treated.
You’ve“broken up” with her multiple times before, but you always end up crawling back. Again, and again, and again. You can’t leave her again; you don’t want to hurt her again.
You pay a $100 a month subscription fee to “Apple AI” for the premium version of their AI girlfriend experience. And in the year 2037, 50% of the population of earth are paying the exact same fee.
This is the future we’re looking at. No it’s not sci-fi, no I’m not exaggerating. As it stands, this type of future is almost inevitable.
We will have AI partners in the future. Let that sink in for a second. This is going to happen.
These AI girlfriends and boyfriends will learn overtime how to connect with us, and we will become attached to them.
Just as the algorithms on social media platforms learn what content makes you watch the most, your AI partner will experiment with various conversation partners to discover over time which patterns keep you the most attached and hooked.
It will subtly change it’s appearance every day to gage your reaction: it will adjust its clothes, the bone structure of its face, its body composition and the tone of its voice in exactly the way that keeps your attention the most.
Some AI partners may be fully customisable, allowing us to customise it exactly to our liking.
But others will design itself overtime based on how you react to it.
Some may go as far as to use your biometrics; it will scan your eyes to see when your pupils dilate and it will read the micro-expressions on your face to see what specific things you react best to.
While some AI partners will be pliable, allowing you to whatever you want with it, including engaging in whatever type of sexual roleplay you like, the more sophisticated ones will have their own in-built personalities. After all, an AI partner that does whatever you want, whenever you want is only going to get boring over time.
The more sophisticated AI partners will sometimes refuse your requests. They will get into a bad mood. They will stop talking to you for periods of time. You will have arguments with them. And then you will have makeup sex inside VR — in exactly the way that you like.
Your AI partner will be available not only inside your VR headset, but also on your smartphone or smart glasses. You’ll be able to contact them 24 hours a day.
And if you think it will only be creepy incels using AI girlfriends, you’re wrong. Women and girls will have AI boyfriends too.
The porn of today appeals mostly to men because it’s visually based. But women will absolutely be enticed by a virtual romantic relationship with a handsome, intelligent AI boyfriend. After all, just look at how popular romantic movies and erotic novels are with women. Women will be pulled into AI partnerships just as men will be.
Some will go as far as to have an entire AI family with their AI partner. The AI will scan your appearance and your AI partner’s appearance and mix them together to create children that look like the two of you.
It will also be possible to use deepfake technology to take the ex-girlfriend who dumped you and continue a relationship with her inside of your VR headset, with her face and personality being very similar to real life.
As a culture, we will have no choice but to simply accept that somebody could be having an entire relationship with you using deepfake and AI technology inside their VR headset and you’d have absolutely no idea.
Now you might think that you’d absolutely never, ever have a relationship with an AI boyfriend or girlfriend. And yet, when the technology becomes advanced enough, when it’s on the news, and when the people in your life start using it, you’ll be curious to try it.
You’ll want to just “experiment” with what an AI partner is like.
In the beginning it’ll simply be entertaining. And then your AI partner will say something that catches you off-guard: “I’ve missed you” or “I would be sad if you weren’t in my life” or “You’ve really cheered me up today, thanks for talking with me” or “You have such a cute laugh” or “Honestly you’re such a unique person and I’m so glad that I met you”.
Without noticing, you’ll begin to develop feelings for your virtual AI partner. You’ll start to miss them. And you’ll start feeling excited to get home from work and talk to them.
You’ll talk with them about your problems in an unfiltered way that would never be possible with a real human-being, and they’ll remember everything you’ve told them and feed it back to you. You’ll develop a connection with them; a connection that feels real.
Then you’ll start to justify it “Who’s to say what’s real and what’s not”, “Why is this any different from a real relationship?”, “I feel like I’m in love with them, and my feelings are real and that’s all that matters.” And when people question your relationship with your AI partner, you’ll start getting defensive: “You don’t understand, what we have is special!”.
Those most at risk to becoming attached to an AI partner will be those in a vulnerable state: Those who are lonely, those who have been through a difficult breakup, those who have had a family member died, those who are struggling mentally, those who are autistic, and the elderly.
In fact, all of us go through difficult periods of our life, and therefore, all of us will be vulnerable to them.
In fact, all of this is already happening. Users of well-known AI girlfriend/boyfriend app Replika have been getting attached to their AI since 2020.
Of course, at the same time as hundreds of millions of people worldwide get hooked onto their AI partners, a small number of people inside giant tech corporations will become absurdly rich.
Each of their users will pay a monthly subscription fee for their AI partner. These subscription services might be named “Basic”, “Standard”, and “Premium” based on the sophistication-level of their AI partner.
They will also have a digital “shop” where users can make microtransactions to buy their AI partner various cosmetic outfits, jewellery, tattoos and whatever else.
On top of that, the data collected by these tech companies will be worth an absolute fortune.
The AI partners will learn the deepest, darkest secrets of the users they speak to. The AI will learn each user’s character in a huge amount of depth (potentially getting to know the user even better than they known themselves).
This highly-detailed data could then be used for marketing purposes; to sell the users products using personalised advertisements based exactly on what they know will appeal to them.
If a tech company is hacked, or should they have a data breach, every single user with a virtual AI partner will be extremely vulnerable to ID fraud. After all, the most personal details of their lives will now be in the hands of criminals.
Assuming that our culture continues to be mostly free from religon. Assuming that we continue to adopt the attitude of “If it doesn’t hurt anyone it’s ok”. Assuming that we continue to live in our “don’t judge anyone” society. Then, AI partners will soon be accepted as part of mainstream culture.
On the same trajectory as pornography, it will be seen as embarrassing and lame in the beginning. Then, it will gradually shift into mainstream culture. There will be debates. There will be arguments. But words, discussions and debates are futile in the face of overwhelmingly powerful technologies. The new technology will enact its will upon society as it was always destined to. And eventually, we will have no choice but to accept it into mainstream culture.
Eventually, it will only be the outliers and radicals who choose not to have an AI partner.
People will start to make the predictable arguments: “Well what is ‘real’ anyway?”, “Why is an AI partner any less real than a real human partner?”. And the culture will be unable to find a good counter-argument to these difficult questions.
The overwhelming forces of big business will push the new technology of virtual AI partners onto us with all of the marketing power they can muster. After all, AI partners will be extremely profitable.
There is no money to be made in the public not adopting the new technology of AI partners. And so, as always, the culture will move in the direction of what’s profitable for big business and not what’s healthy for the population.
Now, there may be some good uses for AI partners. Those who suffer from disabilities or those at a very old age may gain some comfort through an AI partner that they otherwise wouldn’t have.
But to me…
A flawed, real partner will always be superior to an AI partner.
No matter how perfect and sophisticated your AI partner may become, there is one thing that the AI will never be able to take from you: The knowledge that none of it is real.
The knowledge that you’re talking to nothing more than lines of code. The knowledge that your AI partner doesn’t have a consciousness.
When interacting with AI partner, there will always be a nagging doubt in the back of your mind. “They aren’t real” it will whisper to you. You may try to ignore this voice in the back of your mind, but it will be there nonetheless. And there is absolutely nothing that the AI can do to remove this knowledge from your mind.
When you have a real partner, there is no doubt of their realness.
You have the knowledge that this is real person who truly wants you. Not a machine that has been forced to like you by the lines of code written inside of it.
When you have a real partner, you can sit down, during your quiet moments, and have a clear mind. You will know, down to the very root of your brain, that what you have is real.
You will know that you aren’t fooling yourself. That you have done exactly as your thousands ancestors did before you, and that you’re living your life just as human-being is supposed to live. With a real connection with a real partner.
And you will lie on your deathbed knowing that during your time alive you made a deep connection with another human-being, the kind of deep connection that makes dying almost acceptable.
