By 2040, dating could become fully online and be made more efficient with emerging technologies, a new study revealed.
According to the study done by masters students of the Imperial Collage of London, 70 percent of couples will be meeting and interacting with each other and eventually forming romantic relationships online by 2040.
The study predicts that within the next 25 years the rate of data sharing will increase significantly and by 2040, people will be sharing will around 886 gigabits of data every second. The team arrived at the figure after extrapolating the rate of increase in data transfer speed since 1880, IFLScience.com reported.
Researchers surmised that this will be enough to provide a "full-sensory' virtual experience that will let a person interact with another even if they are not physically within reach of each other. Relationship companies could then be able to develop new technologies that will allow couples to interact with each other from a distance.
Romain Bertran, country manager of dating website eHarmony UK, which commissioned the study, said that the dating process will also become more streamlined, thanks to a better understanding of people's behaviour. Devices will be able to track a person's actions, such as the places he or she prefers to go to or the activities he or she loves, and use the data to locate other single people with the same interests.
Developments in artificial intelligence could also help improve people's decision-making when it comes to finding and dealing with love. "Deep learning" algorithms will be able to take in and process a large amount of data and generate feedback in real-time during romantic interactions. This could allow couples to identify potential issues ways to resolve them, and even to determine the best time to get married and have children.
The study also claimed that DNA matching could also potentially be incorporated in the dating process. The decreasing cost of DNA sequencing, expect to fall to only $980 by 2040, will allow people to seek out compatible partners based on their genes, The Telegraph reported.
'This report reflects what we're already seeing in the online dating industry - that people want to be matched with quality people in the simplest and most efficient way possible,' Bertrand said.