Oh they've gone and done it now! Leave it to robots to turn sweet, sexy, passionate
human love into a cold, calculated breeding farm. Whether they need us for batteries like
in the Matrix or they just want our sweet, fertile wombs so they can breed more Cylons
like in Battlestar Galactica, I think popular science fiction has us convinced that some
future super computer intelligence is going to spend all of its 1’s and 0’s figuring
out our birds and our bees. *shudder* Not my birds and my bees - my birds and my bees
are staying right here! No.
But what if the future is now? What if computers are already breeding humans?!?
Bzzt! Hello World! Welcome to CompChomp, the only show on the internets where it is technically
impossible to overanalyze robot love!
Love and machines have been going together for quite a while now. Awww, you guys! Together!
They go together.
Now Computer Assisted Dating goes all the way back to 1965.
There was a lonely Harvard graduate named Jeff Tarr, and he blamed his inability to
find a date on the limited dating pool. He wanted to do something about it, so he sent
questionnaires out all over town to all the students in Boston asking them about their
ideal date. They filled out the questions, sent it in, he put it on punch cards - because
that is how you programmed in 1965. They fed those punch cards into the computer and then
- bzzzt - out popped a list of six people guaranteed to be your ideal date. They called
it "Operation Match". Hah, very militaristic there! Operation Match: guaranteed to find
you True Love! Or Freedom! Murica!!
Obviously, computer assisted dating isn't just for nervy... hehe, nervy... nerdy Hardard...
Hardard!?! wow! ... the NERDS of HARVARD anymore.
Stats Alert! *siren* Stats alert! You know these are going to be good stats when I put
on my stats glasses. And pull out my phone with information because I do not remember
these. 22% of 18-24 year olds have tried an online dating app. 35% of recent marriages
began in relationships that started online. And 1.7 billion dollars is the amount of dollars
spent on online dating every year. That is billion. With a "b". Speaking of "b", this
phone is blank. There's nothing on this phone. It's a prop you guys! It's a good phone though.
The level of machine matchmaking involvement varies depending on the site you've chosen.
Choose eHarmony, and you're going to fill out a questionnaire of over 200 questions
allowing them to rank you in six categories. If you go with Tinder on the other hand, you're
going to be doing a lot of this. This? Tinder? If you're Tindering? Tinderizing? We're going
to go with Tinderizing. If you're Tinderizing, on the other hand, Tinder decides who you
see based on data points matching–things like careers, education, and occupation as
well as technical things like how many times you swipe left or right on someone who is
similar to other people that they want to match you with. Similar to people that are
similar to people... all people are similar to people! Blabl.
Xbox Live matches you up based on the games you like to play and how good you are at playing
them. Oh, what's that? I saw a little bit of an eyebrow raise there. You don't think
that Xbox Live works here? Well, perhaps you didn't realize that 50% of those marriages
I mentioned earlier started from online dating sites while the remaining 50% were from other
places. People are meeting each other on the e-mail, the Facebook and even, yes, playing
the online games.
The one stat we weren't able to find - and, trust me, I tried to have Josh find it - was
the number of WoWbabies out there. But, between you and me, if you meet a kid named Azeroth,
we both know what happened.
So how is it programmers are turning finding true love into a logical nerdfest?
They’re actually using the same kind of matching people up by preferences that we
use in other areas of our lives.
One great example of this is going to help us binge watch 7 seasons of Friends this weekend.
I am not even kidding about that. #FriendsFest! You can tweet at me like, oh no Joey didn't!
- oh yes Chandler did! #FriendsFest. #HashTagsAreLame. Good old Netflix.
Stats Glasses off. These shouldn't have been on this long. These aren't even my glasses.
I'm a nerd with good eyesight!
Back in the day, early Netflix built their business around recommending movies to their
customers. And the success of their business depended upon how good those recommendations
are. Because you and I both know how annoying it is when Netflix keeps telling you to watch
Dora the Explorer. No, Netflix - I don’t want to watch Dora! I don’t! I don't. I've
told you a million times I don't want to watch Dora the Explorer! I did... I told them...
they keep recommending it.
In 2007, they offered a 1 million dollar prize to the man, woman, child or team who dared
to teach those Netflix computers a thing or two about recommending movies. That prize
was claimed by one Mr. Gavin Potter. Josh, did we figure out if he was British or not?
That name is so British. Lord Gavin Potter to see you now. Maybe it's because of Harry
Potter, I don't know. He programmed the computers to learn from a combination of past behavior
and group filtering. And, you guys, group filtering is such a cool thing. And the way
it works is that the computer doesn't have to know any personal stuff about you. It just
needs to know your preferences. If you love the Nightmare Before Christmas and you binge
watch Friends all the time, then, based on that, it knows that you will love... Dora
the Explorer. *sigh*
Ok, fine, I gave it a shot. It actually wasn't that bad. I kind of liked it. You win again,
Netflix. Machine learning!
It’s actually kind of funny. Netflix was putting more money and effort into improving
their recommendations for movies than a lot of dating sites were putting into the recommendations
they make for true love. And that didn’t escape the notice of some dating sites. A
couple of sites in the UK actually approached Gaving Potter after he won and they were like,
yo dude! Can we use your code for our sites? And he was all, okay. And now, you can have
dinner and a date brought to you by the same lines of code!
I wonder which one's going to turn out better. Probably the date. No, the movie!
And machines aren’t just giving us romance in bulk. They’re actually helping one nerd
up his game in a very customized way. This guy built his own Tinder automator to automate
all of his Tinderizing. He built it using a facial recognition algorithm known as Eigenfaces.
"Eigenfatz!" "Eigenfatzes!" And the way it works is he swipes right on a couple pictures
and the algorithm learns which faces he likes. It kind of seems a bit lazy to me. Like this
is not that hard you guys. I don't know, if you want that automation in your own life,
he open sourced the code and you can go on to Github and you can get it for yourself.
So you see that machines are indeed choosing who you see and why. But it goes deeper.
Heh, who writes this stuff?
Let's talk about your good friend, Tony. Tony and you have been friends for years and you
never really noticed him being all that funny. But, lately, his humor has just been on point.
He posts these amazing cat gifs and these hilarious jokes and he's always talking about
his mom and you just, you suddenly realize that Tony is totes adorbs. Now you're walking
down that aisle and you're looking into Tony's eyes with true love and you think that it's
all because you've discovered his magical, natural charisma. But the truth is that you
should be sending a thank you bottle of sparkling apple cider to Mark Zuckerberg - or at least,
the Facebook dev team.
And they probably don't want sparkling apple cider, but that's what I like, so that's what
they're getting. Because Facebook, like other popular social networking sites, uses machine
learning to decide which posts you like and only shows you those posts.
Machines really are breeding humans then! Run for the hills! Delete those apps! Date
your cousins!
No! Don't date your cousins! That would be ridiculous. If you get one thing from this
video, it should be not to date your cousin. But if you get two things, it should be that
there's nothing to worry about with machine learning. Computers have a long and proud
tradition of beating us at our own games. First they crushed us in chess. Then they
started dominating in jeopardy. And now? The dating game!
So what do you guys think? Is it creepy or cool that code plays such a huge role in human
relationships? I'm kind of relieved that I don’t have to worry about being part of
some AI super plot because I met my husband offline the old fashion way. It's actually
this really sweet story. We met our freshman year of college in a dorm that we were assigned
to by... a... computer. Hmmm. Chomp!