The world’s most successful social-media platform began as a rudimentary “hot or not” site. Facemash, created by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, presented viewers with random pairs of student photographs he’d scraped from the university’s intranet, and asked them to rate who was the more attractive. The site was shut down but Zuckerberg is now returning to his dorm-room roots. Earlier this year, he announced that Facebook would launch a dating service.
This makes sense for the company but might leave users a little queasy. I’ve used Facebook since 2007; it has 10 years of my posts, status updates, chats and photos to analyse. It’s becoming clear that we don’t know the extent to which Facebook monitors us, but it certainly holds a huge amount of data on us. Think of all the excruciating private messaging its algorithms will have at its disposal if people use it to find a date.
Yet it may be for just this reason that Facebook — and other tech companies — could be good matchmakers. Why bother leaving things to chance when you could just let all-knowing robots choose your partner? Most apps ask users to accept or reject potential dates by swiping left or right — repetitive labour of the sort humans have always sought to replace with machines. Then there is the small talk, which is quite boring. What if you could get a chatbot to do the basics, weeding out anyone who is particularly unsuitable or offensive?