Computer dating, with the help of IBM’s ENIAC, stretches back at least to the 1960s (listen here to a 50-year-old radio report about it). But when futurist Ray Kurzweil talks about computer dating, he doesn’t think of the machine as a middleman but as a ladies’ man (or lady or some other variation on the theme). It’s disquieting to a lot of us, but is it just around the bend? The opening of Ben Child’s Guardian article about Kurzweil’s recent review of Spike Jonze’s Her:

“It might just be music to the ears of lovelorn geeks prepared to wait another 15 years to meet the love of their lives: a prominent futurologist has claimed that AI girlfriends (and presumably boyfriends) like the one played by Scarlett Johansson in the Oscar-nominated film Her could become a reality by 2029.

Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and Google’s director of engineering makes the claim in a review of Spike Jonze’s much-praised sci-fi romance. In a post on his website, Kurzweil delivered a generally positive verdict on the film, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as a man called Theodore who falls in love with his operating system, Samantha, before moving on to its technological implications.”