I read a short story once, maybe by Ted Chiang of Stories of Your Life fame which inspired Arrival, it talked about how there was a similar system for dating in their world, bots writing for other bots, that eventually the AI got so powerful that it knew who your soulmate was out of everyone in the world and it would tell you.
What the people in the story grappled with was, would you truly want to meet your supposed soulmate or would you want to exercise your free will to find them yourself, even if perhaps that were a suboptimal process?
Edit: the story was The Perfect Match by Ken Liu [0]
I don't know. If my doctor tells me I need to take a certain pill to get better when I am sick, I don't grapple with the lack of free will. I really don't want to take my chances by choosing medications myself. What would be the point of that? Especially in the hypothetical situation where the doctor is perfect, or nearly so.
This feels more like cope than anything. We are stuck in an imperfect situation and tell ourselves it's better this way.
Taking medicine is vastly different than finding love, for most people (even if many do in fact refuse a doctor's orders to exercise their free will too, to their detriment). In fact, for examples of the latter, there are many stories in media about characters going against the grain of what their society expects of them simply so that they can experience their own free will, just as the story I linked.
The "point, " so to speak, in the context of relationships, is that people do prefer to have a suboptimal choice if they can feel like they are the ones that made it. You should read the story that I linked that delves more into this.
> If my doctor tells me I need to take a certain pill to get better when I am sick, I don't grapple with the lack of free will. I really don't want to take my chances by choosing medications myself. What would be the point of that? Especially in the hypothetical situation where the doctor is perfect, or nearly so.
Unfortunately (in the vast majority of cases), a lot of people do. They "do their own research" and go with healing cristals/essential oils, or choose a treatment "compatible with their religion" or some other nonsense. What you're describing is rational (delegating decision making in certain spheres, within reason, to educated people in those spheres), but a lot of people aren't.
What the people in the story grappled with was, would you truly want to meet your supposed soulmate or would you want to exercise your free will to find them yourself, even if perhaps that were a suboptimal process?
Edit: the story was The Perfect Match by Ken Liu [0]
[0] https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-perfect-match...