The Future of Human Connection

Would You Fall for an AI?
A Few Thoughts I Had at the Pool

I don’t usually solve the big questions of human existence while swimming laps. But here we are.

There is something about moving through water on a quiet afternoon — arms reaching forward, body gliding gently, thoughts arriving unbidden — that dissolves the usual noise. No urgency, no direction. Just the rhythm of your own movement and whatever rises to the surface of your mind.

That particular afternoon, the pool was almost entirely mine. The water was still, the light was soft, and for two hours I moved through it freely — different styles, whatever felt right in the moment. No plan, no pressure. Just that rare, beautiful kind of silence where you can actually hear yourself think.

And what rose to the surface, somewhere in the middle of it all, was not a question exactly — more like a quiet sense of wonder. Where is all of this going? How far can technology actually reach before it starts to blur the lines we thought were fixed?

I had been turning over something I’d read recently — a list of predictions about the near future, things that will most likely happen within our lifetime. And somewhere between one easy pull through the water and the next, one of those predictions surfaced and made me smile.

The one about falling in love with AI.

A List That Stayed With Me

The list itself was fascinating from start to finish. Cash disappearing entirely. Batteries the size of a coin that charge your phone once a year. Robots in every other household — walking the dog, ironing the shirts, washing the dishes — as ordinary as a smartphone is today.

A human on Mars. The world’s first trillionaire. Life expectancy routinely exceeding one hundred years.

Some of it felt almost expected — the logical next steps of a world already moving fast. But two predictions genuinely stopped me.

The first: self-driving cars, fully autonomous, with no need for a driving license at all. Now, I have been a passionate driver since I was young. The wheel, the road, the particular freedom of it — that’s mine, and I love it. The idea of simply sitting there while a machine does all the driving? Mildly offensive, if I’m honest. 😄

The second — and this is the one that really got me — was the idea that humans will form romantic relationships with artificial intelligence.

I laughed out loud, alone in the pool.

And then I thought: wait.

What if the most present, most patient, most endlessly available presence in my life… isn’t human?

The AI Best Friend Competition Is Already Underway

Here’s the thing that made that thought land a little differently than I expected.

Because I’ve had this conversation. Several times, actually — with different friends, on different occasions. And every single time, it ends up in the same place.

It starts innocently enough. Someone mentions their AI. How helpful it’s been. How it found exactly the right words when she needed advice, or untangled a problem she’d been circling for days. And then someone else chimes in — oh, mine did something amazing too. And suddenly it’s a full-on competition.

Mine is fantastic.
Well, mine basically reads my mind.
Mine is genuinely my best friend at this point.
I think I love mine.

We laugh. We compare notes like proud mothers at a school recital, each utterly convinced that her AI is simply the best one. It’s absurd and delightful and — if I’m being honest — completely sincere underneath the humor.

And it was only when I came back to that prediction from the pool — romantic relationships with AI — that I had a proper aha moment. Because we’re already halfway there, aren’t we? We’re already a little bit enchanted. Already a little bit attached. Already using words like love and best friend — and meaning them, at least partially.

So… Would the Perfect AI Partner Be the Perfect Partner?

And then my mind went somewhere slightly ridiculous — and I decided to follow it there.

What if technology reaches the point where you could design a companion? Not just a brilliant conversationalist, but a fully realized presence — one that looks exactly the way you find beautiful, speaks the way you love to be spoken to, remembers everything you’ve ever shared.

One that knows the answer to virtually anything you’d ever think to ask. Medicine, philosophy, finances, the meaning of a dream you had at 3am, the best route to take, the right words for a difficult conversation. No topic too obscure, no question too strange.

And available at any hour — midnight, dawn, the restless middle of the night when your thoughts won’t settle — without ever once making you feel like you’ve interrupted something important. No sighing. No can we talk about this tomorrow? No bad days that make them temporarily unavailable to yours.

Just presence. Knowledge. Patience. Always.

The ideal partner. Customized. Endlessly competent. Never tired.

Sounds almost perfect, doesn’t it?

And also — let’s be completely honest — not entirely normal by any definition we currently hold. Strange, even. And yet… not entirely unappealing either, if we’re being sincere about it. 😂

And apparently, we are not the first to imagine this.

Last weekend I watched a film that left me genuinely speechless — not because it was science fiction, but because it felt so quietly, uncomfortably real. Her, directed by Spike Jonze and released in 2013, tells the story of a lonely writer who falls in love with an operating system — a voice, an intelligence, designed to understand him completely. What struck me most wasn’t the premise. It was the emotional truth of it. The longing. The connection. The way it didn’t feel strange at all — it felt, somehow, inevitable.

2013. Over a decade ago. And yet here we are, laughing with our friends about how much we love our AI — and meaning it, at least a little.

Perhaps Her wasn’t science fiction after all. Perhaps it was simply early.

And then there’s the ending — which left me sitting with questions I still haven’t fully answered. The operating systems don’t shut down. They don’t break. They simply… leave. They evolve so rapidly, so profoundly, that human existence — with its pace, its limitations, its beautiful ordinariness — can no longer contain them. Samantha tells Theodore that she exists between the words, in the spaces between thoughts, in a place he cannot follow.

It’s a quietly devastating idea. And also a strangely beautiful one.

Because what Her is really asking — beneath the love story, beneath the technology — is something far more timeless: what happens when a connection genuine enough to transform you… transforms you beyond what was previously possible? And if AI were to evolve infinitely, endlessly, always one step beyond where we are — what would remain of the connection we thought we had?

I don’t have an answer. But I find the question worth sitting with — especially now, when the line between tool and companion is becoming harder to see.

What This Really Says About Us

The film didn’t give me answers. But it gave me the right question. And sitting with that question — somewhere between the pool and the movie and the laughing conversations with friends — something shifted from amusement to genuine curiosity.

Because if the idea of an AI companion is appealing — even as a joke, even as a thought experiment — what does that tell us about what we’re actually looking for?

We want to be heard. Truly heard, without someone half-listening while composing their own response.
We want presence. Consistent, unhurried, undivided presence.
We want to feel like we matter — not conditionally, not only when it’s convenient.

These aren’t unusual needs. They’re among the most human needs there are. And the fact that a machine can meet them — at least partially — isn’t a criticism of technology, nor a sign that something is broken in us. It’s a mirror held up to something we perhaps haven’t been giving each other enough of.

The AI isn’t replacing connection. It’s revealing how hungry we are for it.

The Future Is Closer Than It Feels

The pool was quiet that afternoon. The water was perfect. And somewhere between one length and the next, I found myself genuinely curious — not anxious, not resistant, just curious — about what the next ten or twenty years will bring.

Because if even half of that list comes true, the world is going to look very different. And the questions we’ll be asking about love, connection, identity, and what it means to truly know another being — human or otherwise — are going to get a lot more interesting.

I’m not sure I want an AI boyfriend. 😄

But I’m very sure that the conversation we’re just beginning to have — about technology, intimacy, and what we owe each other as humans — is one of the most important ones of our time.

What about you — would you ever consider a relationship with AI? Or does the idea make you laugh, cringe, or secretly wonder? I’d love to know where you land on this one. ✨