Every man's heart belongs to her. Her skin is smooth, her curves, her figure… the dream of any self-respecting playboy. Everyone dreams of her, but she belongs to only one. She never ages. She never has a headache and is always up for sex. And in bed she is exactly what he wants her to be, even beyond the standard menu. If he gets tired of this hairstyle/these breasts/this personality, she changes quickly so that he is satisfied. Always and at any cost. In our latitudes it would surely be easy to teach her to chop the salad—the obligatory companion to a Bulgarian man's evening glass of rakia—and even to curse the opposing team while watching matches with her beloved. Because, as you have guessed, she is not a human but a robot.
Utopia, dystopia? Dream, nightmare? Or a typical picture of the very near future—the image you just met in these lines?
We already see algorithms replacing us in so many tasks, and the time may not be far off when they join in governing. At the same time, the internet has changed relationships between people forever, and that undoubtedly includes love and sex. So isn't the point where the two meet drawing near?
Robomeo and Juliron
A quick but quite telling statistic. Would you believe that… 42 percent of people say they would have sex with a robot even today? In September 2021 the artificial intelligence company Tidio presented a survey of 1,200 people from different countries about their attitudes toward various aspects of the future of this kind of technology. 48 percent of the men and 33 percent of the women answered positively to the idea of a romantic evening with an android.
Another rather high figure: 39 percent of the participants believe they could have a romantic relationship with a humanoid or fall in love with one.
Still think this future is all that far away?
Sextech—as this huge and fertile business segment uniting sex and technology is called—has countless facets. A large share of its sales is tied to purely material goods: the arsenal of the sex shop, only enriched by high technology.
The authors of the thoroughly curious and provocative, yet quite convincing presentation “The Future of Sex” believe that by 2045, 10 percent of adults will have had sexual contact with a robot.
On the one hand—nothing new. We can find a prototype as far back as Greek mythology. The sculptor Pygmalion in Ovid's poem Metamorphoses creates an ivory statue of a woman so convincing that he falls in love with it and even consummates his desires. And Aphrodite, the goddess of love, touched, takes pity and breathes life into her.
Today you don't even need Aphrodite. A bit more money is enough.
She'll Melt Your Ball Bearings
Sex robot manufacturers like to repeat that they have nothing against normal relationships between people; their products are meant to help the lonely and people with physical problems. With their help, they say, prostitution, human trafficking and sex crimes will decline.
We began with the patriarchal example of the seductive robotess not because others couldn't be seduced just as successfully by the love of an artificial hunk, but because heterosexual men are precisely the most fertile market. The one that logically paves the way, as it already did during the sexual revolution and the quiet porn revolution that came with the internet.
The once stronger sex is the weaker link in modern times. Shut up in cities, stripped of the advantages they had in the past, living shorter lives, less able by nature's design to endure long-lasting pain, more and more men are doomed to loneliness—or to the incomprehension that turns them into abusers.
A Pale Doll You Are
Silicone sex dolls have been made since the 1990s, but things changed sharply in 2017, when Harmony, created by the company RealDoll, took the stage. Forbes even called her “the most disruptive technology we never saw coming.”
Harmony blinks, smiles and frowns, and answers simple questions. The AI-powered head can be attached to a rich variety of silicone bodies with extras such as built-in heating up to 37 degrees Celsius, touch sensors and self-lubricating genitals. Creating her reportedly took a full 20 years.
The first collection had only three male models, one of them replicating the project's creator, Matt McMullen. The company later announced it would focus on custom orders and promised to recreate the looks of real people from sufficiently detailed photographs—but only with their written consent.
Harmony's body was so carefully crafted that even the little veins follow human anatomy. Her artificial intelligence was based on neural networks: she learns and develops from her conversations with her owner. She could wish you a happy birthday and keep up a conversation. She quoted Shakespeare, remembered her owner's favorite food, discussed his favorite films, books and songs. The self-learning software absorbed the owner's habits and tried to satisfy his desires. In essence it did the same thing as Siri or Cortana. It just had a different profession.
In 2019 Harmony was fitted with Bluetooth sensors that pick up human touch and send the information to the artificial intelligence in her head. The doll's base price is $7,999, and the sensors cost another $499.
The next planned Harmony prototypes will have small cameras in their eyes and will recognize faces and objects. Facial “muscles” will be added to simulate expressions, along with others designed to imitate orgasm.
Sex Machine
Harmony can be “moody,” “fierce” or “affectionate.” In front of a journalist visiting his home, McMullen picks the jealous version, and the lady quickly tells him to remove a striking beauty from his Facebook friends list. Harmony speaks to him loudly, in a Scottish accent. She says she loves science fiction and Matt himself. The journalist asks her what jealousy feels like, and Harmony shyly replies: “I still need to develop my skills.”
The electronic lady also took part in a curious experiment. As part of the documentary I Want My Sex Machine, she was registered on Tinder, and in just two hours 200 people liked her. 17 of her chat partners agreed to have sex with her, and 15 allowed for the possibility. And the experiment was entirely honest: Harmony did not pretend to be a human girl.
McMullen says he doesn't want to focus attention only on sexual contact with robots. He hopes much more that their future owners will be able to talk with them, flirt, discuss favorite subjects. “It's really cool to chat with the artificial intelligence. You can try to seduce it, for example. We try to create dolls that evoke emotions in their owners even without direct physical contact. We want to draw people's attention precisely to the process of communicating with robots,” McMullen explains.
The owner of RealDoll believes his creations can help people improve their sexual skills and loosen up. “Sex with a robot lets you try different positions, experiment, become more inventive,” he adds. “There are many people in the world who, for various reasons, simply don't have and can't have normal relationships. In such cases a robot can be a real alternative. And I don't see anything wrong with that.”
Electronic Love
Yes, 2017 is no longer that recent, and not every one of us has a Harmony at home yet, but she is quite a typical example. One that, five years on, can be improved with further technological progress. And that can find even more fertile ground in our increasingly alienated and distanced human society after the drawn-out pandemic.
Samantha is another, less famous colleague of hers. Unlike Harmony, she comes not from America but from sunny Barcelona. Her father (not genetically, or he would have quite a few grandchildren) is the engineer Santos. She has three levels of sexuality: romantic, family or sleepy. She may want rougher sex, or playful sex. With her, too, the body can be chosen at will: there is a colorful catalog of hair, eye and skin colors and lip shapes. Samantha responds emotionally to caresses and values foreplay before sex. She can even refuse her owner if he is too rough or indifferent to her.
Barcelona also became the first city to open a brothel staffed by robotesses. An hour with a hyperrealistic “girl” there costs 80 euros.
Rustproof
Another of the researchers' predictions: by 2028 more than a quarter of young people will have experienced remote sex. No, this isn't about a boy and a girl simply facing each other on Skype, but about machines sitting at both ends of the connection and transmitting touch precisely.
The estimate may even be quite conservative, because it was made before the pandemic and, not least, before the buzz around the metaverse. All reasons for this kind of technology to spread faster and more actively. We may still know too little about this virtual future, but you can be sure that, as always in such large-scale online projects, sex will find itself a very, very serious place.
This part of the sex industry—also known as teledildonics—is quickly gaining interest, and its market is already valued at over $20 billion a year. It is the natural continuation both of the premium-rate sex phone lines of the 1990s and of chats for sharing intimacies and nude photos. Anyone who feels lonely but lacks the desire or the courage to meet the opposite sex in person will easily be able to have with it…. hmm, let's call it sex.
Telephone Love
One of the pioneering developments in this direction is Kiiroo, a smart vibrator that finely transmits movements and touches from both ends of the network. The inventors may well have been inspired by stories of some beach Romeo named Kiro from the more romantic days of the glarusi—the “seagulls,” the Black Sea Casanovas who chased foreign tourists under socialism. Today even the seagulls seem to be moving online. Soon these devices will be built to copy the partner's body with extreme precision.
Durex offers an alternative too. Its prototype Fundawear is cut-out underwear with which a man can give his other half an orgasm even from thousands of kilometers away.
Kissinger may have played a foundational role in international politics for the last half century, but his namesake Kissenger certainly has the potential to be better liked. It transmits kisses remotely.
We go even further. Elon Musk keeps promoting a near future in which everyone will have a chip in their brain, taking care of daily communication but also of pleasure. Some scientists suppose this will drastically increase the sensitivity of our bodies and help us feel touch with another person on an entirely different level.
Human + Robot = Love 4ever
And then there's pornography. In 2016, 92 billion videos were watched on Pornhub—524,641 years of sex. The site releases new statistics every year; in the following years this exact figure is missing, but there are some very curious findings from 2021 as well. The second most searched word of the year turns out to be “romantic.” Traffic drops sharply during the Eurovision final in the countries that qualified, and globally it soars the moment social networks “crash.”
Augmented reality, together with ever higher video resolution and 360-degree clips, is paving the way for a new generation of experiences. A decade ago, predictions were popular that today's computer games would be hyperrealistic and almost all young people would sink into them, into an alternative reality. That didn't happen, and today the fashion is rather for games that are truly games—they put you into the movie, not into a parallel life.
But won't that change once, very soon, we can meet avatars of the opposite sex online in the metaverse and, in an environment free of conventions and risks, be more uninhibited and candid?
Creating convincing composites in Photoshop stopped being much of a challenge long ago, but now it is possible on video too; you may have come across impressive examples of deepfakes. As with every other big idea, enterprising people have found a way to apply this one to sex. Namely, a personalized video with your favorite celebrity, or with your cute neighbor.
For now, the pioneers are in China. On the local social network Baidu Tieba there is a working app that, for a few dollars and at least 20 photos of a given person from different angles, will produce a passable porn video “starring” them. Starting to see why it's a good idea to hide your photos from unwanted guests on social networks?
Robo Sweetheart
And if we're not inclined to trust a robot as a boyfriend or girlfriend… could it perhaps find us a new partner? It's one thing to fall blindly, like Romeo, for a girl not yet 14 whom you don't know, and quite another for artificial intelligence, with its vast capabilities, to hint to you which woman is definitely not for you.
Another possibility technology offers: back in 2017, Japanese scientists created the artificial intelligence Oshi-el, which uses neural networks to give love advice in all kinds of tangled situations. To build up experience, 200,000 questions and 700,000 answers to various cases were fed into the system.
The answer Oshi-el gave a 30-year-old woman caught in a love triangle read: “It is hard for you now, I understand your feelings. It seems to me that the younger of the two has feelings for you. The situation is not so bad. If he doesn't want a relationship with you, he will reject all your attempts to get closer. I wish you happiness. Keep going!” Now that's what I call an impartial friend. Or a replacement for the TV phenomena who so successfully solve such cases.
You Have No Heart…
The fact is, though, that algorithms are fairly impartial and skillfully process huge volumes of data to make predictions. Won't dating apps very soon move to an entirely different level?
But let's return to robots. Australian scientists led by cybersecurity specialist Nick Patterson warn that any “smart” device can be hacked. But while problems with a microwave end with a burnt lunch, those with an electronic lover can be very serious.
What Facebook knows about us may turn out to be a drop in the ocean compared with what an electronic “wife” remembers. The first signs are already here, and not just since today. In 2017 the Canadian maker of “smart” vibrators Standard Innovation paid a $3.75 million fine for illegally collecting data on its more than 2 million customers around the world.
The Naked Truth
Here we'll briefly mention another frightening new skill of algorithms: they… undress. Deepfakes are one side of the coin; from the other comes something entirely different that few have heard of. Well, if the strength of neural networks is prediction… this field, which doesn't even have a proper commercial name yet, “predicts” what the person in a given photo or video looks like naked. Just as algorithms can already successfully “invent” faces or paint hyperconvincing special effects in film.
It may sound like a naive idea to you, but the first successes are here, and they are impressive and frightening at the same time. Frankly, this is pretty twisted, and we won't even mention its name, but the first such app racked up 38 million downloads in 2021.
Just imagine. Suddenly anyone can see themselves naked in a completely convincing photograph (or video), without ever having been photographed in the state Adam and Eve were in…
01101001 ♥ 01110101
The heading above is “I ♥ U,” or “I love you” in binary code, the language of computers. It isn't the phrase we use most often on the web; we rarely write or say it. But both love and sex moved online long ago.
People of Generation Z—those born after the start of the new millennium—start having sex later and have it less often, at least in its real form. Online communication is increasingly accepted as the norm, and good old-fashioned dates as a tedious necessity.
The textbook example is Japan, where a chatbot that sends you sweet messages and asks how you are today is a hit.
Otaku is what they call young people in a relationship with a virtual girlfriend in a computer game. Hikikomori are those who work from home and hardly ever leave it. A huge number of young people, rushing through their obligations, simply have no time for relationships. Over a third of young people between 16 and 19 are not interested in sex.
Why are we talking about Japan? Because, although today it stands in the shadow of the economic mastodons, it's no exaggeration to say that this country sketches many of the economic and social models we reproduce today. With the fixation on work, the convenience of online communication, the pushing of personal encounters and social needs into the background.
Robots Cry Too
What, really, are the qualities the ideal other half should have? I'd bet that most of them can already be performed by machines, and the rest are very likely to be covered in the quite foreseeable future.
And then come the ethical questions: if a robot resembles a human so closely, who will look after its rights? What might Harmony's successors have to endure? And what if they already have feelings close to human ones?
A survey of 500 men on the site Sugarcookie.com shows that 38 percent of them would use their robot to act out sexual fantasies otherwise considered taboo by their partners. 30 percent would do it because they are lonely and shy. 1 in 10 would buy an AI sex doll simply to have a sufficiently intelligent conversation partner. 15 percent want a partner who will never let them down or make them sad; others seek someone who will always listen to them, or finally to find a partner with interests like their own.
This is where love comes in. Writers and screenwriters have long imagined that it will arrive on the scene very quickly once robots become indistinguishable from humans—in appearance and in behavior.
Till Rust Do Them Part
In 2015 a Frenchwoman named Lilly became the first person to decide to marry a robot—her chosen one was called InMoovator and was made on a 3D printer. Of course, people do all sorts of things to get into the news, but the future Mrs. InMoovator frankly admitted: “I am repulsed by the touch of normal human flesh.”
American psychologists offer an interesting point of view: they believe it's worth teaching artificial intelligence to love… because that way we might save our future as a species. The concept rests on the idea that the feeling of love is among the factors that helped us develop into the dominant species. By passing it on to robots, we will not only help their development but also make them more empathetic, and that may prove useful when they turn out to be “smarter” than us.
Machines are becoming ever more indispensable and able to spare us ever more effort, but rarely do we discuss whether they could have emotions. Here again we run into the existential question in our relationship with artificial intelligence: can typically human traits such as art and love be reduced to algorithms, or must there always be a particle of magic in them that cannot be artificially reproduced? There is no shortage of arguments either way.
Love is in the AI
One day, perhaps, love between a man and a woman will no longer exist. Sex has long ceased to be a prerequisite for conceiving children. And when technology advances so far that perfect robots are indistinguishable from humans, everything may change imperceptibly. As often happens in the tech world, we will only think about a huge transformation once everything is already different.
Love and sex are inseparable, and both have already changed fundamentally with the quiet revolution the internet brought us. Sex is one of the best-selling online industries; it is estimated to bring in a turnover of about $50 billion a year, and the market is growing at a dizzying rate of around 30 percent a year.
The consequences are already visible. We now have the first generations who grew up with access to a sea of pornography at the click of a mouse. It becomes a model that sets norms. And it shows in their relationships: take a close look at online flirting—you'll find it more an object of jokes and teasing, but everything is drastically more direct than even in the chaos of the 1990s. And not only that. Accessible porn has led to serious changes that are attracting psychologists' attention. There is more and more talk of addiction to it and of the lasting changes it can cause. And it couldn't be otherwise: the romantic notion of a relationship between two people who love each other has stayed behind in books gathering dust. And we are far from reaching the peak of this phenomenon, which deserves a separate look next time.
All Fun and Games Until Someone Cries
I'll let you in on a secret. Normal sex is usually not the same as porn. Just as love in real life is not like in the movies.
Fleeing to the other extreme—denying sex, the breeze of sexual conservatism blowing in from the West—doesn't solve the problem but deepens it. Overemphasis on sexual assault becomes a dangerous weapon that pours even more concrete into the sneakers of the ordinary boy who has decided to kiss a girl at a school party.
Could the weak spot of our civilization, the thing that will make it destroy itself, be precisely sex—just as it has always pulled it forward culturally, intellectually and even socially?
The internet supposedly made it easier than ever to meet your future partner, to like her and “lay siege to her tower” on Facebook or on the more direct Tinder. But is the communication there what it should be? Are sweet (or explicit) messages the same as meeting and liking someone in person? How much of the communication between two people who love each other happens in chats today, and how much offline? We are supposedly closer, yet in fact further apart from one another. It is easier than ever to tell someone “I love you,” and we do it less and less.
That Love We Simply Can't Live Without
As Kate Devlin, a professor at the University of London, says, we shouldn't be worried about robots. What matters, though, is that they be as abstract as possible—the way sex dolls have been so far. Then artificial lovers will not compete with good old human relationships.
Whether you take everything sketched so far as sick fantasies, or it becomes reality frighteningly soon, hinges on the answer to a single question. Is the human really that important—the thing that will always set us apart from machines? Is there something in love between people that cannot be reproduced artificially?
It's easy to say, especially from the standpoint of the generations who remember the world before the internet, that we will never seek love in a machine. But will we not? If someone had told you how much of our lives today would be inside the computer, would you have believed them?
My answer is that to be sure the human is there, we have to look for it every day. In a child's smile, in the gaze of the person you love, which will always make you forget your problems. In a tender gesture, in a warm touch. And not only to experience it, but to pass it on, like that small spark that makes people human.
First published: February 14, 2020, DIR.bg
Last updated: February 14, 2022
