Robot Love

We don’t just have a relationship with technology, we use technology to find relationships. Newspapers, video dating, website matching services and apps – and to the most direct of all – Tinder.

The reason Tinder works is simple. It replicates human behaviour in the real world. The moment someone walks into a night club they look around at the faces of people and say to themselves, Yes, No, No ,Yes, No, No, No, No Yes, Yes. And the people they are looking at are doing the same thing back at them – assuming of course they are both looking to meet someone. But in the actual nightclub there is that awkward discovery process of trying to work out if the other party feels the same way. Which then becomes the business model of the nightclub – Sell people drinks for that few hours of the discovery process.

One of the core functions of the alcoholic drinks was to make people look better, and feel more confident. Well, technology has managed to do replace this as well – let’s just say that instagram filters are the new beer goggles!

Technology has a way of replicating what we do in the real world, and in doing so, it creates competition in business which are non traditional, even hard to align. Beer volumes may decline due digital photo filters. Insights like this are very difficult to report in a corporate market share update.

In the not too distant future – things could get even weirder. People developing serious relationships with humanoid robots – Robots which look, feel and act, just like humans. The vote 50 years from now might make gay marriage seem so minor as we vote on whether or not humans and robots can get married!

Happy Valentines Day.