Bumble Founder Outlines Dystopian Future Where A.I. Bots Date Each Other

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Dating apps have plenty of pros and cons, but they’ve highlighted the valuable role technology can play when it comes to helping people find a romantic partner. Now, the founder of Bumble has turned some heads by sharing their vision for how artificial intelligence could eventually be harnessed in pursuit of that goal.

There was once a time when online dating was burdened with a stigma that essentially dissolved when apps like Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble burst into the mainstream in the 2010s. Nearly 30% of people on the market in the United States have used those platforms in search of a connection in the past five years, and 70% of the members of that group have entered into an exclusive relationship because of them.

You’d be hard-pressed to find many tech companies that haven’t started to embrace artificial intelligence over the past few years thanks to its reputation as The Next Big Thing. That includes Bumble, which has started to use A.I. to crack down on fake accounts (some of which were probably created with it) and scammers on its app.

However, it doesn’t sound like it’s stopping there based on what Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd had to say while speaking at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco on Thursday.

During a conversation with Bloomberg‘s Emily Chang, Wolfe caused some audience members to audibly chuckle when she implied we could be heading toward a future where the courtship process involves two A.I. bots talking to each other in the hopes of finding a match.

Here’s what she had to say:

“If you want to get really out there, there is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierges…

Then you don’t have to talk to 600 people. It will scan all of San Francisco for you and say, ‘These are the three people you really ought to meet.'”

If we’re giving Herd the benefit of the doubt here. she’s essentially describing a high-tech version of a matchmaking service that would eliminate the need to swipe thousands of times and have dozens (if not hundreds) of conversations with strangers in the hopes of finding something that sticks.

With that said, the impersonal aspect of online dating is already a major point of contention for plenty of people who’ve subjected themselves to it,  so painting a vision of the future that involves A.I. bots courting each other is probably going to make the concept a fairly hard sell.