CapabilitiesPartially correct
“People are beginning to have relationships with automated personalities as companions, teachers, caretakers, and lovers. [By 2019.]”
Inventor, futurist and author of The Age of Spiritual Machines
Said 1999Deadline Dec 31, 2019Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), chapter '2019'; passage reproduced on the publisher's edition page
By 2019 companion AI at real scale existed — Replika (2017) and Microsoft's Xiaoice drew millions of users who described them as friends or romantic partners — so people had indeed 'begun' such relationships. But mainstream automated personalities (Siri, Alexa, Cortana) remained transactional and the teacher/caretaker/lover roles only became widespread after the 2022–2023 LLM wave, so the prediction was directionally right but early on breadth.