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The future of relationships

Feb 1999

When the telephone was invented, its main use was thought to be in listening to opera. The idea that young lovers would chat on the telephone was the subject of Punch cartoons. But of course, teenagers spend half their time on the phone. Now with email and the internet, there are even more platforms where relationships can play out. It is not uncommon to work for an entire project with someone you have never met, and sometimes never even spoken to.

On the internet, people make new friends in far off places, and sometimes these eventually result in marriage. Now the network is everywhere, and mobile networks permeate every inch of the planet. Kevin Warwick and his wife Irena will soon have chip implants that link their emotions together in a primitive way. A few years down the road, they will know all the time what one another are feeling, wherever they are. They may directly experience a sensation or see some information on a display. This will destroy the last of the barriers imposed by geography. Previously, emotion could only be conveyed crudely by the network through tone of voice or the words used, but soon, with such emotion chips and large screen immersive video communication, body language and emotions will cross the oceans as easily as if the people shared the same room. However, it is likely that people will still 'top and tail' business relationships with physical meetings. People will always want to get together physically sometimes. As we meet more and more friends and business contacts on the net, we may actually travel more, not less.

Recent research has shown that excessive internet use can make people depressed, because it leads to isolation and network based relationships are a poor substitute today for physical meetings. But the technology will improve greatly in coming years. By 2010, 2m screens will be commonplace and local telecomms will have high capacity. Video meetings in homes can then be life size. But the real significance of this technology arises from the fact that many members of our society, particularly the old, have precious little contact with people except for the check out assistant at Tesco every Thursday. With few friends and relatives nearby who are mobile enough to visit, loneliness is a huge social problem. Anything that can improve their social contact, even if it is only a life sized image on a screen of someone the computer has identified as a potential friend, is bound to be a plus. Separation need no longer be an excuse for relationship breakdown.

One of the most critical stages of any relationship is the first meeting. When we see lots of potential partners at a party, it is anything but obvious to most of us which ones are most compatible. Now, you can have various aspects of your personality and preferences encoded in a badge that automatically talks to all the other badges in the vicinity. Personality matching programs do the matchmaking. If someone there is a good match, you will both be alerted, saving hours of time chatting up the wrong person. This technology is already available in primitive form at some night-clubs.

Relationships with people you meet on the net may be quite different from those with people who you know physically. As technology permits more graphics, simpler man machine interfaces, and more artificial intelligence, we can expect some horrendously tricky relationships. On the internet, no-one knows you are a dog, or a robot, whether you are 6 or 60, fat or slim, ugly or attractive. A person’s cyberspace avatar can have any desired appearance and behaviour, or can mimic the originator's actions in real time with a different image. Some time after 2010, we will have direct retinal projection via active contact lenses that are able to produce computer generated overlays on what we see in the real world. Even if your partner's physical appearance is not quite up to your hopes, it could be digitally enhanced or completely replaced with something closer to your dreams. You will never be quite sure who or what you are interacting with, and we will need whole new social protocols. Network relationships may be immensely confusing.