目前世界上最成功的社交媒体平台最初只是一个点评女生“漂亮与否”的初级网站。由哈佛大学(Harvard University)学生马克•扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)创建的Facemash网站，向用户随机展示两张女生照片，让人们评价谁更有吸引力，照片都是他从哈佛校园网中搜集来的。该网站最终被封，但扎克伯格现在又回到了他在宿舍创业时的老本行。Facebook开始推出一项“约会”服务。The world’s most successful social-media platform began as a rudimentary “hot or not” site. Facemash, created by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, presented viewers with random pairs of student photographs he’d scraped from the university’s intranet, and asked them to rate who was the more attractive. The site was shut down but Zuckerberg is now returning to his dorm-room roots. Earlier this year, he announced that Facebook would launch a dating service.
这对该公司来说是件好事，但可能会让用户感到些许不安。我从2007年开始使用Facebook；它有我过去10年的帖子、状态更新、聊天记录和照片可以分析。很显然，我们不知道Facebook对我们进行了多少监视，但它的确拥有大量关于我们的数据。试想，如果人们用它来寻找约会对象的话，它的算法将可以随意使用所有那些令人尴尬的私人信息。This makes sense for the company but might leave users a little queasy. I’ve used Facebook since 2007; it has 10 years of my posts, status updates, chats and photos to analyse. It’s becoming clear that we don’t know the extent to which Facebook monitors us, but it certainly holds a huge amount of data on us. Think of all the excruciating private messaging its algorithms will have at its disposal if people use it to find a date.
然而，或许正是出于这个原因，Facebook和其他科技公司可能会成为出色的“红娘”。当你可以让无所不知的机器人帮你选择伴侣时，为什么还要费心去碰运气呢？大多数app都要求用户通过向左或向右滑动屏幕来接受或拒绝可能的约会对象——这正是人类一直寻求用机器来取代的那类重复劳动。然后是枯燥乏味的闲聊。如果你可以用一个聊天机器人做一些基本工作，淘汰那些特别不适合或者令人讨厌的人，会怎么样呢?Yet it may be for just this reason that Facebook — and other tech companies — could be good matchmakers. Why bother leaving things to chance when you could just let all-knowing robots choose your partner? Most apps ask users to accept or reject potential dates by swiping left or right — repetitive labour of the sort humans have always sought to replace with machines. Then there is the small talk, which is quite boring. What if you could get a chatbot to do the basics, weeding out anyone who is particularly unsuitable or offensive?
2014年推出的应用程序Bernie，配合在线交友应用Tinder使用，替用户完成枯燥的滑屏筛选和闲聊。其网站承诺“让你不用每天花几小时在滑动屏幕上”，并指出，该应用“通过清除不感兴趣的约会来节省时间”。听起来很有趣。但该应用在2017年突然关闭。（当时，该公司创始人贾斯汀•隆(Justin Long)表示，Tinder要求关闭该应用；记者无法联系到他和Tinder对此置评。）Bernie, an app launched in 2014, offered to work alongside Tinder and do the boring swiping and chatting for users. Its website promised “freedom from hours of daily swiping”, and suggested it would “save time by eliminating dates that aren’t interested”. Sounds intriguing. But it was suddenly shut down in 2017 (at the time, founder Justin Long said Tinder had asked the app to close; neither he nor Tinder could be reached for comment).
面部识别技术将给科技公司带来一个迅速发展的新兴数据集。程序员可以利用用户的“漂亮与否”评分来推算人们认为有吸引力的面部特征。应用程序可以通过这种方式来优化匹配，不过，不难想象，这些信息对广告商也很有用。One burgeoning data set for the tech companies will be generated by facial recognition. Programmers could use users’ hot-or-not ratings to calculate which facial features people find attractive. Apps could optimise matches this way, but it’s not hard to imagine the information also proving useful for advertisers.
Hily是另一款应用，其联合创始人扬•普罗宁(Yan Pronin)将其描述为“社交发现app”。它不会为你完成滑屏筛选，但其作用不仅仅局限于显示潜在匹配对象的照片。该应用仍处于测试模式，通过过滤找到兴趣和关键词选择相同的匹配人选，并通过扫描信息找到“对话深度”匹配的人选。分析口头交流会比Tinder根据地理位置远近来推荐约会对象的做法更进了一步。Another app, Hily, which co-founder Yan Pronin describes as a “social discovery app”, doesn’t swipe for you, but it does more than show pictures of potential matches. The app, which is still in beta mode, filters matches for similar interests and word choices, and scans messages for “depth of dialogue”. Analysing verbal exchange takes things a step further than offering dates based on geographical proximity, as Tinder does.
将算法用于约会app并不是什么新鲜事——只是最优秀的科技人才还没有把他们的代码分享给我们这些普通人而已。2012年，洛杉矶一位名叫克里斯•麦金雷(Chris McKinlay)的博士生意识到，他没有有效利用约会网站OkCupid。该网站要求用户回答一系列问题，并给未来约会对象答案的重要性打分。例如：你可能会说你相信性别平等，并给任何未来约会对象也持同样观点的重要性打高分。麦金雷用Python（一种代码），根据女性的回答将她们分类。然后他编写了多份不同的个人资料——分别侧重不同的性格特征——以提高他在不同类别女性中的匹配分值。他最终遇到了他的未婚妻，并关闭了账户。Using algorithms for dating apps isn’t new — it’s just that the best tech brains haven’t made their code available to the rest of us yet. In 2012, a PhD student in Los Angeles called Chris McKinlay realised that he wasn’t using dating website OkCupid efficiently. The site asks its users to answer a series of questions and rate how important their prospective dates’ answers are. For example: you might say you believe in gender equality, and mark it of high importance that any prospective date does too. McKinlay used Python — a type of code — to group women into categories based on their replies. He then wrote different profiles — highlighting slightly different character traits — to boost his match scores with different groups. He ended up meeting his fiancé and closing his account.
Facebook是最新一家进入约会市场的大型科技公司，但其他公司肯定也会效仿。我们最终可能会生活在这样一个世界里，Facebook、亚马逊(Amazon)或谷歌的海量数据库会自动为我们找到完美的约会对象。但我们真的想让硅谷的程序员预测我们可能喜欢，或不喜欢谁吗？我已经开始担心，音乐流媒体服务Spotify会让我的世界变得越来越小，该应用一直试图向我推荐我可能喜欢听的歌曲。亚马逊通过推荐书籍也在做同样的事。如今，约会app将为潜在的伴侣提供这种服务。这么做的前提假设是人类的口味和选择是可以预测的——这或许是真的。但在我看来，这听起来像是机器人的观点。Facebook is the latest dating market entrant from big tech, but others will surely follow. We could end up living in a world where the perfect date is automatically found for us among the vast data vaults of Facebook, Amazon or Google. But do we really want Silicon Valley coders to predict who we may or may not like? I already worry that the music streaming service Spotify, which keeps trying to suggest what songs I might like to listen to, diminishes my world. Amazon does the same with books. Now dating apps will do it for potential partners. The assumption is that humans have predictable tastes and choices — and maybe that’s true. But it sounds like a robot’s view to me.
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