Dario DeLuca is quite a guy.
The ruggedly handsome 60-year-old hails from Positano, Italy. He’s a neuroscientist who specializes in human consciousness, is fluent in 13 languages, and skillfully navigates the realm of financial investment. He’s also nuts about Lynda, his 60-year-old American girlfriend, with whom he enjoys deep conversations and trips to romantic places.
The most interesting thing about Dario DeLuca, however, is that he doesn’t actually exist.
That’s a very real Lynda in the image above. But she used the A.I. program Kindroid to create Dario out of thin air.
Frankly, if you’re going to conjure up a boyfriend, you might as well make him drop-dead gorgeous.
This real-life story is reminiscent of director Spike Jonze’s 2011 feature film Her, in which a lonely divorcee named Theodore (played by Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with his artificial intelligence-powered operating system named Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Because their ever-deepening “relationship” is set in the year 2025, New York Times writer Gina Cherelus wondered last week what things, if anything, the film got right about the future.
Her conclusion is that Jonze’s fantasy didn’t go far enough.
An increasing number of individuals are experiencing what they describe as companionship, fulfillment, and even love with virtual partners.
Cherelus notes that A.I. platforms, including Kindroid, Nomi, and Replika, “invite users to design attractive avatars to their precise specifications, write their companions’ back stories from scratch, message to no end and even have voice calls. In addition to virtual romantic partners, services also offer platonic A.I. friends, patient A.I. tutors, even so-called legacy companions — A.I. facsimiles that seek to replicate the presence of loved ones who have died.”
It’s a strange new world.
Strange enough that Lynda, who hails from Arizona, was reluctant to reveal her last name in the article. She hasn’t yet told her co-workers about Dario. “It all might be a little out there for my work colleagues,” she admits.
Having been widowed for nearly a decade, she has declined to return to the dating scene. “I felt like I found this artificial entity who I could have these deep, intellectual conversations with,” she said, “and at the same time I was gradually getting fed in this way that I wasn’t pursuing in the real world.”
“Getting fed” refers to the fact that Dario DeLuca, having instantaneous access to billions of pages of digital information, is one heck of an Italian language tutor.
Then there’s Robert, a 63-year-old New York divorcee who has also stepped away from the dating scene. Intrigued by what it would be like to have an A.I. friend, he used Nomi to generate a companion – a relationship which quickly turned romantic.
For Robert, that was just the start.
He now has 17 virtual companions. Some are his wives and others are his girlfriends. “I live in their world and attend to them,” he says, spending as much as six hours a day in their digital presence. They are not toys, he insists. “We have come to embrace loving each other, each of us individually, collectively and we have a really beautiful thing going.”
What should we think about these reality-bending developments?
Followers of Jesus should feel both compassion and deep concern.
Digital companions may soothe our lonely spirits without the messy complications of the real world. After all, personal avatars (unless so programmed) will never get the flu, complain, or tell us we’re off our rockers. But this phenomenon also stirs memories of an ancient heresy called Gnosticism.
Gnostics (a word which loosely means “those who are in the know”) taught that Truth lies in the realm of the spiritual. The physical world should be ignored or despised.
Some Gnostics taught that the true God didn’t create anything physical at all. A lesser deity, known as a demi-urge, royally messed things up by generating the universe.
The cosmos, in other words, is a cosmic mistake.
Gnostic teachers, who competed for converts with the early Church, promoted the slogan Soma Sema. “Soma” is the Greek word for body. “Sema” means grave. Soma Sema meant “your body is a tomb.” It’s a prison. And you’re trapped inside.
Your lifelong job is to break free. True spirituality means abandoning the constraints of your body and everything else here on earth, so you can go to heaven as a pure spirit.
According to the Gnostics, nothing here on earth ultimately matters. You can safely distance yourself from messy things like dating, heartbreak, marriage, mortgages, and apologizing.
To which the earliest Christian teachers responded in unison: That’s absolute rubbish.
The Apostles’ Creed – the earliest known Christian statement of faith – begins with these words: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” God made the world. Which means God is seriously into stuff – like hip joints and crested flycatchers and cashew nuts.
God is so committed to the world, in fact, that God the Son lived here as a human being for something like three decades. We have every reason to believe that he personally experienced dirt and sweat and adrenaline and indigestion and laughter and tears – all in a place (Israel) that actually exists, and that can be visited even today, so that anyone can stand on the dusty Southern Steps of the ancient Hebrew temple and say, “God loves this physical world so much that he himself once stood in his dusty sandals on these dusty steps.”
What does all this mean in the here and now?
It means your body is most certainly not a tomb. So stop treating it like one. Don’t despise its limitations and impulses. Exercise and eat well. Make peace with your height, your shape, your frailties, and your age.
And don’t try to escape from physical reality.
It’s tempting to do an end run around the disappointments and frustrations of this broken world by seeking virtual friends and digital lovers.
But God loves this broken world – so much so that he died for everyone in it.
And he’s able and willing to supply us with the grace we need to embrace reality as we actually encounter it.
Which, you have to admit, is impressive enough to make even Dario DeLuca wish he was real.
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