You’ve been making your own decisions about who to be friends with for quite some time now. But can you really be trusted with such important matters?

That’s the somewhat startling question posed by a new app/“art project” called pplkpr (aka, People Keeper). With the help of a heart-rate wristband, it knows when your encounters with others are causing your emotions to spike, and prompts you to report on these occurrences.

Finding trends in your personal relationships
Based on its analysis, pplkpr “auto-manages your relationships,” inviting certain people to hang out while blocking others it deems toxic. Kind of reminds us of when our moms chose our playdates.

So, are we progressing or regressing?
In all fairness, pplkpr is an experiment – one that raises some interesting questions. Do we need/want every aspect of our lives, even our relationships, quantified and managed? Have we become so dependent on social media that we now need digital assistance to make sense of our interactions with real live people? While we ponder those questions, we’ll continue to fumble along for now, making friends all by ourselves.