Last month, the tech startup Orchid introduced its personal AI assistant to the world. The launch video has been viewed over 27 million times on X. It begins with a young couple. A jaunty instrumental version of ‘Valerie’ plays in the background to remind the viewer that Orchid is completely normal and not the by-product of an unrelenting cacotopia. The hapless boyfriend, Sam, has forgotten their anniversary. What a loveable klutz! The girlfriend — who isn’t afforded a name — texts Orchid, the couple’s incorporeal personal assistant, to ‘fix’ the situation. ‘Wayyyyyy ahead of you,’ replies the amoral software masquerading as a gal pal. ‘If this works, he owes me dinner too.’
Except he doesn’t, Orchid, because you aren’t a real person. You aren’t alive. You don’t have a body. You can’t eat food. The best you can do is consume water indirectly via the cooling system of an AI data centre. But forget about the semantics. ‘Valerie’ is playing. You love this song. You’re having fun. Everything is normal. Everyone should want a thruple with a wisecracking AI personal assistant that ‘lives’ inside their messages. The nightmare continues. Orchid sassily reminds Sam of their anniversary. ‘Ok. Ok,’ he types. ‘I can do this.’
‘You can’t. That’s why I’m here,’ replies Orchid. This is where the HAL-9000 alarm bells would normally start ringing, but Orchid types in lowercase, and ‘Valerie’ is still playing. Orchid books a restaurant on Sam’s behalf. The advert then reaches its tone-deaf conclusion with a tactlessness that only Silicon Valley could find palatable.
The backlash to Orchid’s video is as unanimous as it is unsurprising. ‘We are living in Dante’s Inferno,’ wrote one X user. ‘Are you barely a person who doesn’t care about anyone or anything at all? Perfect new product for people who suck here,’ quipped another. And my personal favourite: ‘I am old. I am probably wrong. But no human should want this product, and if it turns out that a significant number of them do, then I hope to get hit with an asteroid.’
Orchid’s creation was entirely predictable. It’s the natural conclusion for a culture that has been optimising and outsourcing for years. The only difference is tech companies are now outsourcing emotional labour. Think back to the early days of optimisation — a time when computers wheezed and tech entrepreneurs looked less like Johnny Bravo and more like Gareth from The Office. VisiCalc. Lotus 1-2-3. Quattro Pro. Microsoft Excel. Systems designed to save time by delegating remedial tasks to an unthinking machine.
Then came the era of personal optimisation. At first, it was our physical health: pedometers, sleep monitors, calorie counters. But that wasn’t enough. Tech needed to be worn, to be omnipresent. Oura Rings. Whoop Straps. Fitbits. Everything measured at the touch of a button. Everything tracked and scored. Everything personalised and commodified.
At a certain point, we realised we could also outsource our choice-making faculties. Human cognition could be streamlined, optimised and quantified. Everything from reading a book to downloading a song. Meaning could be swapped for measurements, the whole spectrum of the personal life quantified by metrics and markers.
Goodreads gamified the act of reading with progress bars and achievement ratings. Spotify tailored its algorithm to an individual’s music taste with ‘Made for You’ playlists and Xavier, the platform’s jarring AI DJ. Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube and other streaming services introduced collaborative filtering, meaning a person would never see something outside of their comfort zone unless they actively searched for it. Dating apps destroyed romantic serendipity with the creation of a tiered-pricing model: ‘You too could be hit by Cupid’s arrow, but only if you can afford it.’ Even the act of walking aimlessly — the flâneur — has been muted by navigation tools, health apps and step counters. I hate to break it to you, but the pervasive quota of 10,000 daily steps actually stems from a 1965 Japanese marketing campaign peddling commercial pedometers. Think about that the next time you open Apple Health and see you’ve walked a measly 9,999 steps.
For fear of sounding like a fridge magnet copywriter, it is our mistakes that define us
Consumer tech is all about cognitive offloading. It has been for some time. Orchid is just the latest example. How many cognitive tasks can a person offload? That is the billion dollar question. In the case of Orchid’s Sam, it would seem to be his entire relationship. This is probably a neat idea if you’re an emotionally stunted manchild with a Garmin Venu 3 and an empty flat by Silicon Roundabout, but for the rest of us, it’s a sobering forecast for modern relationships.
Orchid expected us to look at Sam and see ourselves. ‘He’s just like me. I’m also a garbage human with little care for others. I also don’t know what a sell-by-date is or the importance of an anniversary. Sign me up!’ But Orchid was wrong. As humans, we understand that we’re fallible. For fear of sounding like a fridge magnet copywriter, it is our mistakes that define us. Sam forgot the anniversary. Judging by Orchid’s impertinent tone, this isn’t Sam’s first blunder. Sam is an idiot. His girlfriend should probably dump him or, at the very least, confront him about his ineffectuality. She could find someone better. He could realise the error of his ways. But that doesn’t happen. Instead, an emotionless software acts as a romantic go-between. The cracks in the relationship are painted over with a ‘silicon’ brush. No one learns anything. And the relationship continues so long as they can afford their subscription model.
We are substituting choice for efficiency, but choices lead to mistakes, and mistakes can lead to serendipitous rewards. You deserve the chance to download a god-awful song. You deserve the chance to stumble across an obscure and unsettling European film with no tangible plotline. You deserve to waste an afternoon strolling around a hidden neighbourhood without a phone directing your every move. And you deserve to meet an incompatible romantic partner without paying £35 a month for the privilege. Those are your mistakes to make.
Imperfection is not in the tech world’s lexicon. Tech companies have spent years trying to mitigate human error, but this has been an oversight. The response to Orchid’s grim announcement video has made one thing clear: failure is a necessary friction of daily life. It is our prerogative to fail. Mistakes are to be celebrated, within reason. You can’t code for imperfection. Or perhaps you can, but it is unprofitable. Let us hope it stays that way — because if Silicon Valley realises the monetary value of imperfection, that precarious line between man and machine will vanish for good.
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