Silicon Valley conference explores A.I.-driven matchmaking

The Love Symposium, a conference in San Francisco in November, brought together tech executives, app developers and philosophers who are experimenting with using technology and artificial intelligence to streamline romantic matchmaking. Attendees paid about $200 for presentations, breakout sessions and flash matchmaking and heard pitches ranging from relationship-outcome prediction tools to “metarational” marriage practices.

The event featured founders such as Ann Pierce, an organizer who described San Francisco as a “thinky town,” and representatives from Keeper, a dating start-up that uses A.I. and human experts and offers a $50,000 “Marriage Bounty” plan. Keeper’s lengthy application asks for items including height, ancestral background, SAT score, political views and even scans to assess facial features and estimate IQ; users who fail to match receive constructive feedback, the company says.

Speakers proposed ideas including A.I. agents that could nudge real-world interactions, avatars that court on a user’s behalf and digitally aged previews of partners.

Key Topics

Tech, Keeper, Love Symposium, San Francisco, Ann Pierce, Artificial Intelligence