The database of the senses. By Olivia Solon

We are facing a new sexual revolution: reproduction without sex and sex without a human partner. It promises us healthier offspring and customised love robots. For all its convenience, however, there are risks – from which the technology itself may liberate us: by growing out of us and saying goodbye.

The contraceptive pill and other birth control techniques heralded an era of sex without reproduction. From the 1960s through to today, attitudes towards sex have radically changed. Women, for the first time, have been given more agency over the outcomes of sexual encounters. This has helped to change long-established gender roles, reducing the risk profile of extramarital sex, altering decision-making (or perhaps offering real decision-making) about when to start a family, and challenging employers’ perceptions of women.

We are now on the cusp of a new sexual revolution: reproduction without sex. Cryopreservation of embryos, eggs and sperm allows for time-shifted, convenient conception. Scientific advances make it possible to bioengineer eggs and sperm from other cells in the body, such as skin cells, opening up the possibility for infertile or post-menopausal individuals to procreate. Eggs can even be made from male cells and sperm from female cells, which means that same-sex couples could procreate without the need for a donor of the opposite sex. Of course, male couples would still need a surrogate for the gestation period, but developments are being made to create an artificial womb: Tokyo University researchers have pioneered a technique called extrauterine foetal incubation, where they have taken goat foetuses and placed them into incubators containing artificial amniotic fluid heated to body temperature. Catheters are attached to the large blood vessels in the umbilical cord to supply the creatures with oxygenated blood. None of the animals have yet reached full term, but the research team is confident that it will be possible: Aldous Huxley’s Hatchery — a baby factory — may become a reality. Sex will be encouraged as a social activity, but children will be manufactured to make sure they have the most desirable genetic makeup.

By divorcing the act of sex from procreation, humans can focus on maximising pleasurable experiences without worrying about synchronised fertility cycles and ticking biological clocks. Just as the aforementioned advancements in technology can be used to aid procreation, so too can they allow for new sensual experiences. On a basic level, this is about smarter sex toys, but extends to orgasms-on-demand, love drugs and sex robots.

TECHNOLOGY PUSHING OUR BUTTONS

Technology has been used to enhance pleasure since as far back as the Palaeolithic era, but has evolved from simple dildos through to connected, interactive teledildonics whereby paired toys relay touch data to each other, allowing couples to share a sexual experience from a distance. These same teledildonic devices can be synchronised with pornography to allow for enriched auto-erotica. As technology evolves, it will allow for mind-blowing sensations that have potential to eclipse those experienced during human-to-human intercourse.

Connected sensory experiences will become more sophisticated as they move into the realms of bioelectronics and electroceuticals, whereby electrical impulses are carefully mapped to the nervous system of the body in order to produce pleasurable feelings. Once the neural pathways of the brain and body have been understood with sufficient granularity — no mean feat — we will be able to artificially stimulate our nerves in order to provoke sensations and orgasms.

It is likely that we’ll supplement these simulated sensory experiences with chemical ones, targeting neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin in order to heighten sensations similarly to the way they are heightened on recreational drugs such as ecstasy. Orgasms in the future could be dialled up to 11 thanks to careful manipulation of our central nervous systems. This would completely decouple the sensations from the physical activity, meaning that we could experience the stimulations that work for other people — accessed via vast digital libraries.

PLEASURE MACHINES & INTIMACY

However, the more we seek out these elaborate sexual experiences, the further we get away from human connection. Historically, humans have had sex for pleasure and have had to “work for” that pleasure through wooing and charm. But if machines can offer us more pleasurable experiences, what need will we have for fleshy appendages and orifices? We certainly won’t need them for reproduction. Real intercourse may be deemed too hard to come by, boring and messy. Why waste time and money trying to track down someone sexually compatible when you can press CTRL+SHIFT+O for orgasm?

Sexuality will become divorced from real emotion and intimacy and sex will be a means of provoking pleasure and release in the most efficient way possible. Human sexuality will be commoditised in the way that friendship has been commoditised by Facebook.

On the top, as we build better gadgets to stimulate and titillate on demand, we run the risk of demystifying sex and sensuality. Humans have historically sought out not just the physical act of sex, but a deeper connection with other human beings, involving feelings of love and intimacy. These feelings, in turn, allow for more intense carnal experiences whereby people “make love” as opposed to “have sex”. This involves emotional intimacy, courtship, urgency and fear of abandonment. Without these elements what are we left with but robotic, perfunctory genital stimulation?

Humans may, therefore, seek to emulate these stronger bonds and demand forms of technological companionship — robots that provide more than just sex and can or even have to be courted before they agree to have sexual intercourse. Of course, such creatures don’t exist yet. But there’s already a growing market — albeit niche — for life-sized sex dolls that at least look a bit human-like and so provide their buyers with the illusion of real companionship. These are transitioning beyond the inflatable stag party joke and into the realms of photorealistic, interactive companion robots. One such product on the market today is Roxxxy, a gyrating, articulated android with synthetic skin. She also has some level of artificial intelligence and has been designed to learn the owner’s likes and dislikes, will talk using a Siri-esque voice response and can even send the owner emails. She’s meant to be a companion — albeit a very simplistic one — as well as a lover.

In Japan, this urge for companionship with a trend for virtual girlfriends is satisfied through a Nintendo DS game called LovePlus, a dating simulator that offers a range of digital companions. Spike Jonze’s film Her — where a man falls in love with an artificially intelligent operating system — gives us a glimpse at how these virtual interactions might extend into deeply-entrenched, loving relationships. Or, at the very least, relationships that seem to be loving.

Today’s technology is somewhat crude: we are in the sexbot 1.0 era. The machines we have developed are relatively dumb and offer little more than elaborate masturbation. But as the robots become smarter and with more agency, they may be able to make their own decisions about which humans they would like to have as sexual partners. In his book Love and Sex with Robots, artificial intelligence expert David Levy predicts that by the middle of this century we will have robots that are so lifelike and so embedded with intelligence that they will be almost indistinguishable from human beings (although we’ll have to find a way to bridge the uncanny valley in the interim). We will have sex with these robots and some of us will marry them. Robots may end up replacing human prostitutes and reduce sex trafficking, he argues. By combining a beautiful high-tech, anatomically correct android with a refined AI, the human alternative may simply be made to seem less appealing.

The trend has already started. According to surveys conducted in Japan in 2008 and 2010, young people are increasingly uncomfortable with human-to-human sexual interactions. Some 36 percent of men aged 16 to 19 reported that they had an aversion to sex with another person, while some said they preferred anime characters and that online sex was less unpleasant than the reality of copulation.

Robots and virtual beings will be able to simulate the perfect lover: asking about your day, agreeing with you when you criticise your boss, remembering your birthday and all of your favourite foods, and not complaining when you get fat or don’t wash. They would never be unfaithful or grow tired of your jokes. Algorithms would enable them to read micro-expressions on your face to detect when you were sad, bored or angry, while synthetic sexual organs would be ergonomically designed to fit human ones like they were made for each other because they would be.

Actual humans cannot be this perfect. People are not created to serve just one other person. We are complex, emotional and unpredictable creatures. We must balance the desires of loved ones with our own needs and feelings: we have an identity that extends beyond our roles as lovers, partners or family members.

Those who choose a love-and-sex robot should be warned, though: machines do not feel emotion. They merely fool humans into thinking that they do. And humans are easily fooled, our egos are too easily stroked — this has been shown in a variety of settings, but particularly in elder-care situations, where robots such as the seal-shaped Paro have been able to provide sick or depressed people with a way of comforting themselves and resolving personal issues. Despite the fact that they don’t really care about their users’ problems, these robots – in the words of MIT researcher Sherry Turkle – “push our Darwinian buttons” and inspire “the feeling of friendship”.

If our robotic partners tell us what we want to hear, we may never have to face up to the complicated reality of real human exchange; we will retreat to our digital yes-men and -women. Procreation will prove impossible without medical intervention. We will have evolved to not evolve (at least not naturally); humans will be the new pandas — entirely reluctant to have sex for procreation.

But we shouldn’t lose all hope. If we are lucky, the machines may reach a level of sophistication where they are not satisfied with human-level relationships – as we saw with Samantha in Her: she was capable of being simultaneously “in love” with hundreds of other men – something that human partner Theodore found difficult to fathom. In the end, it was the AI who chose to leave the human, after evolving to a higher level of existence.

If the robots don’t start finding humans boring, it is likely that emotionally healthy people will find robotic relationships unfulfilling and simplistic – at best we will consider these creations to be like pets and at worst, imposters. If there’s no risk of the object of your affection ever leaving you, how can that relationship ever truly be valued? How can it even be considered a meaningful relationship? Even though we might like to fool ourselves with the artifice of robo-relationships, ultimately we will seek out authentic interactions and will retreat back to the messy and heartbreaking world of human-to-human intimacy. People want to be really, authentically loved, not the object of a love simulation.

OLIVIA SOLON is an editor with technology magazine Wired. She specialises in technological developments, science and digital culture.