Better Loving Through Technology

Like every technological development, AI is ripe for revolutionising humanity’s relationship with sex. But are its effects on emotional intimacy even more profound?

Words: Kate Devlin
Illustration: Alva Skog

“Hey Siri, what is love?”

“Love,” replies Siri, in perky tones, “as I understand it, refers to a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude.”

Siri doesn’t understand it, not one bit. Siri is a virtual assistant that parses your voice queries and responds, where possible, in an efficient manner. That hasn’t stopped users — an estimated 600 million a week — asking the likes of Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assistant all sorts of fun questions. (“Fun questions” rank third in the most-used types of commands, behind music and weather. Amazon has reported that Alexa is asked “Will you marry me?” thousands of times each week.)

Chatbots — software that can converse with human users — have been around for a while. The current crop of AI voice assistants, which extend this capability by responding to commands, is somewhat more complex. We’ve adapted to this…