Forty per cent of people say they can imagine going head over heels for their virtual assistant
Look, falling in love isn’t that easy. Sure, it happens all the time in films, but actually finding someone that you genuinely want to share all your experiences with until the end of time, and one who reciprocates your quite invasive determination to do absolutely everything with them, is harder than make believe would have you think.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that 40 per cent of people, battered into loneliness by simply existing on this vast planet, can imagine falling in love with Siri, the virtual assistant on your iPhone that hardly ever works. Fusion reports that a study of 12,000 Assistant.ai users – technology very similar to Siri – revealed that nearly half of people can imagine loving the app and a quarter thought it was possible.
I’d imagine loving Siri (or a similar incarnation) at its current operating strength to be infuriating, a relationship represented by one phrase, that phrase being "I’m sorry, I didn’t quite hear that", a relationship marred by a horribly uneven power dynamic and sexual shortcomings. Tellingly, 60 per cent of people surveyed admitted to swearing at their digital assistant.
Of course, we can all see the inevitable on the horizon - soon we’ll all be loving and fucking robots because they’ll be so perfectly tailored to our each and every desire, that loving a human being will become redundant to the point where we’ll think "Shit, remember when we went out with each other? Weird".
But for now, I’d say that there are definitely more options on the market than the dodgy virtual assistant on your iPhone. Yes, the world is a confusing, terrifying place and picking out those beautiful moments of love in amongst the chaos can be difficult, but falling in love with Siri? Surely things can’t be that bad just yet.
