Also dinners. If you can’t agree on where to go to dinner, just quit now.

Whenever there is another news story (like this one) about how we’re inching ever closer to discovering the secret of “defeating death” or “reversing aging”, the easy immediate reaction is “whoa, cool, I can be immortal!”.

Leaving aside the fact that I personally think that sounds terrible (discuss!), the follow-up thoughts are a lot more interesting. Even if people don’t stop dying completely, and just lived much, much longer than they already do, there would be tons of repercussions for society. Economic, environmental, social.

For now let’s focus on one: relationships.

Conventional wisdom says that as life has extended, marriage in particular has been forced to change; that when life expectancy was shorter, it was more attainable to have a healthy relationship for twenty to forty years, but as people live much longer, can any one partnership possibly be expected to sustain itself for sixty, or a hundred?

And if we shift expectations that life will almost certainly extend a hundred years (or two hundred, or more!), it seems likely that our expectations on how any one relationship could last that long will have to shift too.

In a world where people live twice as long, how do the parameters of long-term relationships have to change to accommodate?

Would people still try to partner up and stay together “til death do us part”?

Shift into more open ongoing relationships with multiple partners?

Accept that a series of long-term but non-permanent relationships can be satisfying for all involved?

Or do we just give up marriage all together?

We’re talking way beyond pretentious Mensa member stuff here.

Everyone thinks they’re at least fairly smart. Lots of smart people are humble about how smart they are (but really wonder if they’re even smarter than most people give them credit for). Lots of not very smart people are awfully confident that they’re smarter than you think they are. Is it possible we’d be better off if we all knew for sure exactly how smart we are, or would this be a disaster?

Imagine there were a way to measure intelligence absolutely, taking into account all the factors that you perceive to make someone “smart”. So through some process, your knowledge, wisdom, intuition, insightfulness, critical thinking, and ability to articulate ideas clearly, across all subjects or expertise, could be factored down to a simple number.

Imagine also that this is instantaneously applied to everyone in the world, which makes it possible to know with certainty, based on a percentile, where you or anyone else really stood in relation to every other person on the planet in terms of intelligence. You might be 47% or 83% now, but suddenly, you would know for sure.

Then imagine that some technology (a digital readout across your forehead, online database searchable by your mobile device, whatever you want) allows you to not only know your absolute intelligence rating, but also any other person’s, anytime you want.

[Note: I’m assuming it is possible to change this number with effort. Studying, learning, even just gaining life experience would potentially add to your rating, assuming you were gaining intelligence more than others who are not trying as hard. So this number isn’t a lifetime sentence or privilege (though some might have a genetic head start or natural hurdle to overcome), but a totally accurate real-time measurement relative to everyone else in the world.]

If it were possible to know this, would you want to?

If it were possible to know this about everyone else (and for them to know it about you), would you want that also?

How would this knowledge impact your day-to-day life, and how you deal with the people in your life?

How would it affect society in general, from things like education to job interviews, dating to elections, even just watching TV or sports?

Do heavy Tinder users have the least, or the most, need for a site like this?

The recent Vanity Fair article on the way Tinder is changing dating — or possibly even destroying it, depending on your reading — seems to be taking the internet by storm this week.

One way to read it is that no one cares about relationships at all anymore. It’s just convenient, on-demand sex with acceptably attractive partners, and this is how young people live now. Another is that this generation is going to lose all understanding of how relationships work because of their glut of options for sexual partners.

One thing the article doesn’t seem to address is how the existence of Tinder is changing how people behave in order to do better on Tinder. Are they all obsessed with skin care in ways we weren’t before? Driven harder than ever to have gym-hardened bodies so they get swiped more often when their appearance is their only opportunity to impress? Do they spend hours faking smiles for practice selfies? Become nearly-professional photographers in their quest for the best-lit, perfectly framed headshots?

The image-first style of these apps, and the superficiality and judgment that comes with them, is barely mentioned at all in the article, but that’s what interested me (as someone who has never used Tinder). So.

What would an app with the opposite priorities of Tinder look like?

How would it work? Would you use it if you were single? If not, who would?

Would those people be having as much sex? Better dates? More relationships?

I can’t say why they chose a photo of a cheater looking at wedding photos instead of for a new mistress.

An especially tough ethical question today! Do we have sympathy for the victims of data theft when hackers decide to punish a site like Ashley Madison for making a business out of people cheating on their spouses? Or, as Heather Havrilevsky asks in NYMag, are we throwing stones when our houses (or in this case, our pasts) are made of glass?

As easy as it is to chuckle at a bunch of douche-bag dudes getting outed for cheating, consider for a minute the full scope of ramifications endemic to our new, easily hacked lives. Every last one of us is hopelessly vulnerable to hacking today, thanks to insecure smartphones; insecure databases; absurd, ever-changing, and increasingly invasive Terms of Service; and supposedly benevolent megacorporations that illegally suck private data off unsecured Wi-Fi systems and legally compile private information gleaned from multiple apps to sell it to data brokers like Experian who might, in turn, haplessly sell it to Vietnamese identity-theft crime rings. If that sounds like some kind of Orwellian paranoid fantasy, it may be time to wake up and smell your credit-card numbers hitting the Dark Web.

…

This might be a good day for us to rethink our attitudes about the victims of hacking, whether it’s Sony’s Amy Pascal or the married dude next door, because the mob is coming for us, too. Do we really want to live in a world where no one is allowed to make mistakes? Are we arrogant enough to believe that we’ll never screw up? If we do screw up eventually, do we want our future personal failings to be judged and prosecuted by a self-righteous mob who may or may not share our values and ideas about right and wrong?

What rights do cheaters have in your mind, even if you are a person who says they would never, ever cheat?

If the answer is ‘they get what they deserve’, consider instead: what would you do if your most shameful secret was suddenly online?

Is there any scenario in which you, as a person being cheated on, would be able to get over it?

If the person you loved did it once, regretted it, and would almost certainly never do it again, would you want to know, or be better off never knowing?