Dateline: November 13 2036
It’s quaint to think that back in the day single people used to hang out in bars, go to clubs with their friends, and attend boring functions and “festivities” in the hope of meeting people and finding potential companions. Even life partners.
I am not making this up. Most of us are too young to remember how dating worked before the internet and smartphones. And the horror of a matchup, being sent on a blind date by a well-meaning friend, almost never with a good outcome. But that was before we had dating apps and AI agents to do the matching for us.
Then came the AI revolution and everything got turned on its head. You never knew if what you were seeing was real or fake. Sifting through piles of slop and trash to find a few genuine profiles became an exhausting process. It almost made sense to rather meet people by accident.
But now, thanks to DeepTrue Duplicates, you can create an authentic digital replica of yourself, with your looks, mannerisms and obvious traits. A real you, only digital. We call them “dupes” and they can interact online on our behalf. Genuine and verified.
And what better way to get to know someone than to chat with their dupe? Whether you’re thinking of hiring them or taking them out to dinner, it’s a non-threatening way of getting an unguarded response to your curiosity.
What’s more, it’ll give you the same space to evaluate our compatibility. Your dupe can chat to my dupe. And if they like each other, we can hook up. / First published in Mindbullets November 13 2025.
Trust me, I’m an AI
Smart software is so convincingly smart that we trust it more than people
Dateline: June 2 2022
“Trust me, I’m a doctor!” is an old cliché we’ve all learnt to take with a pinch of salt, but now there’s a new benchmark for trust.
How often, when a friend or colleague spouts a factoid or news bite, do you check it out on Google for accuracy? And when driving to a new destination or trying to beat traffic you rely on your smart device — car or phone — for navigation, don’t you? You’d never ask a stranger for advice.
All these things are driven by AI and we’ve come to rely on them because they’re usually right. Machines learn by consuming vast amounts of data and they get constant feedback from other machines, “adversarial networks” that evaluate their performance on the job. No humans can handle that level of throughput.
As a result, we’ve now got AI systems that tell us who to hire and who to fire, when to buy and sell, what to plant where and when, and even who to date. Our contracts and tax returns are checked by AI, our medical scans and test results are screened by AI and in some societies our behaviour is automatically evaluated to see if it’s socially acceptable. By AI.
Sure, there are biases and error bars in any system, but these are mainly baked in by the architects and designers, who after all are only human. And there’s bias and prejudice in every society so you can’t really blame the computers for picking up on it. Ethics and norms are a social problem, not a data construct.
And most of the time - almost all of the time - the machines are more accurate than people, better than humans at finding errors and diagnosing conditions, identifying criminals and the like.
You can take it from me, it’s true; trust me, I’m an AI. / First published in Mindbullets June 5 2019.
- Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.
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