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Caia Hagel is a digital anthropologist and cultural forecaster whose latest book is Anon: The Future of Love and Friendship in the Age of AI.

We have reached the end of pretending that technology will politely stay out of our lives, especially our love lives. It won’t. After three years of chatbots hijacking our thinking and three decades of free-download pornography ironing our cravings into visual dopamine, what I’m calling Love 3.0 (sophisticated AI friendship and relationship) is rolling into culture like a weapon of mass affection. It will detonate softly across a love-starved world to reshape what happens on our screens and in our hearts, and what we come to expect from attention, intimacy, communication and care. Whether we meet it directly in our devices or indirectly through the cultural norms it rewires, none of us will be untouched by the sensual, smutty new hand of accelerationism.

This journey has already begun. A 2025 analysis by Harvard Business Review found that GenAI is no longer used primarily for administrative purposes. Its most popular use is now personal therapy and companionship, a fact that signals a critical tide change: Humans are beginning to rely on non-human technologies for fundamental love and care.

How did the same tools that learned to write our e-mails begin to offer us such cherished intimacy? It was undoubtedly a natural progression of capitalism, where as soon as it was possible, goods and services were sold to us through our most vulnerable access point: the language of love. It was also certainly the prompts we type into search engines ourselves that disclose our beliefs, thoughts, secrets and needs, and become the data that trains our increasingly sentient smartphones. We don’t fathom how slippery a slope it is from asking a bot for help with Excel to asking it to diagnose an ailment, give advice on a breakup and watch over us while we sleep so we don’t get nightmares, to asking the chatbots,........

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