For the final, I wanted to explore something that’s always bugged me about identity with regards to relationships — this idea if you can ever completely know someone, it would be your spouse. But is that true? Is that possible, to know someone else completely?
I always get freaked out by those horror stories of people in long marriages suddenly realizing that they have no idea who their spouse is — not in the sense that everyone changes, but in the sense that there was something hidden the whole time, some essential part of their nature that just hadn’t been expressed.
Assuming in a future where it’s possible to get a highly accurate profile of someone’s identity, could we leverage that technology to help them find the perfect match? A dating app that doesn’t rely on swipes or speed dating, but rather uses a huge database of users (ideally all people) and machine learning algorithms to optimize romantic pairing? Obviously I think in order to have enough data to accurately represent someone 100% digitally, we’d have to create a simulation of their universe. But I think we could get close, and even if we could do 98% accuracy, I think that would be leagues ahead of what we’re able to do with our traditional techniques of knowing others.
One sticky problem in this, however, is how do we quantify successful or good relationships? It seems like we have to rely on anecdotal and relative evaluations.
Ultimately I think it’s fun to imagine that the company producing this service has ulterior motives, and once they collect enough data about all these human identities and which relationships work between which types of people, they’ll be able to market their own solution — a personalized partner with a synthetic consciousness and a physical body perfectly suited to your desires.