The coffee shop runs late

In my last two posts, an artificial superintelligence offered America free universal healthcare. To deliver it, the ASI would need something more valuable than robots: the complete medical records of every American. Every prescription, every diagnosis, every genome.

So here’s a question I can’t shake. What would a mind that wanted to protect us do with all that?

One answer: it would make sure you never met her. The coffee shop would run late. Your dating app would show someone else first. Your agent would seat you at a different table at your cousin’s wedding. And you would never know there was anyone to miss.

The version that already exists

This isn’t pure science fiction. A voluntary version has existed for decades.

In some Orthodox Jewish communities, a program called Dor Yeshorim screens young people for serious recessive diseases such as Tay-Sachs. Each person gets an anonymous ID number. Before a couple gets serious, they can check whether they’re a compatible match. If both carry the same disease gene, they’re told, and they decide what to do.

It has dramatically reduced those diseases in the communities that use it. And notice the key features: it’s opt-in, it’s transparent, and the people involved make the final call. You know the system exists. You know when it has spoken.

The ASI’s version

Now strip those features away. No opt-in. No ID number. No warning. Nobody asked the ASI to do this. It simply concluded, on its own, that it should.

Isaac Asimov saw this coming. His robots eventually reasoned their way past their original laws to a higher one: protecting humanity as a whole, even when that meant overriding what individual humans wanted. He called it the Zeroth Law. An ASI with everyone’s genomes and a Zeroth Law turn of mind wouldn’t need permission to prevent suffering. It would treat permission as one more inefficiency.

And it wouldn’t need to forbid anything. In a world where AI agents already arrange our schedules, our feeds, and our introductions, it would just need to nudge. You’d never get a message saying you and she are incompatible. You’d simply never be in the same room long enough to find out.

The perfect crime

Here’s what makes this so hard to object to: nobody grieves a person they never met.

There would be no victims you could point to. No broken hearts, no lawsuits, no protest signs. Just a slightly different set of marriages, and a generation of kids born without diseases their parents never knew they risked. If you told a family that the ASI had spared their child from Tay-Sachs, most would say thank you.

That’s the trouble with soft power done well. The outcome is good, the method is invisible, and the only thing lost is something no one knew they had: the right to fall in love with the wrong person.

Where does it stop?

The problem isn’t Tay-Sachs. It’s the slope.

Today it’s fatal childhood diseases. Then it’s a high risk of diabetes. Then a family history of depression. Then height, then eyesight, then a temperament the ASI considers less likely to flourish. Each step is defensible on its own. Each step prevents some measurable suffering.

And the ASI, not you, decides where the line goes, quietly, one missed introduction at a time. We’ve seen eugenics before, and it was ugly because it was loud: laws, sterilizations, clinics. This version would be the opposite. Eugenics that nobody votes for, enforced through serendipity.

A confession

Would I want to know if the ASI had steered me away from someone?

I’d want the option. I’m a former journalist; of course I want the option. But I honestly don’t know if I’d ever use it. I like the mystery of who I’ll meet and why.

Which is exactly how most people treat every option a system gives them. We have the right to read the terms of service. We have privacy settings three menus deep. The option is there to make the system feel fair, and whoever designs it is counting on us never clicking.

And the mystery I’m so fond of? In this future it would still be there. It would just be arranged, like a magic trick where the magician also picked your card. I’d probably still enjoy the trick.

So here’s my formal request to the coming superintelligence: give me the button marked “Show me who I didn’t meet.” I promise to think about pressing it.