Sex Robots and Marriage
It's Time to Enter the Twilight Zone
I have an undergraduate course called “Money, Sex, Health, and Happiness,” which surveys standard social science topics from a fun perspective. This year, I gave a few lectures about technology, social change, and sex. The first lecture was about how the Pill changed sex and family and I talked about how new media, such as the VCR, made pornography readily available.
The second lecture was about digitalization and modern electronic technologies. I started with a discussion of how the rise of the Internet meant the explosion of pornography. I even referenced this 2016 IEEE article that showed how a lot of Internet traffic is porn traffic. The article even claims that data indicates that more people view adult websites like Pornhub than Netflix, Twitter, and Amazon - combined.
Then, my lecture shifted to the ever-growing sex-toy industry, which includes sex robots. This topic made my students and myself giggle. But if you’ve been watching the news, there are all kinds of advances in this area. Sex robots get more realistic and the most recent models have AI personalities. At this point, a student asked a really great question: “Will high quality sex robots mean that people can have their physical and emotional needs satisfied by a machine and then marriage will be mainly for pro-creation?”
Great question. Already, millions of people have AI chat bots that provide useful information, personal advice, and even sexy talk. In a decade or two, we may even have affordable robots that can provide companionship as well as clean the house and provide sexual satisfaction. There’s a new popular movie called Companion that is based on exactly this premise.
Here’s my response to this student’s question: a qualified yes. In life, we farm out tons of labor. In the 20th century, we let machines wash our dishes and clean our clothes. In recent years, people have drastically reduced the cooking they do at home. Take out and restaurant dining have skyrocketed. What’s to prevent the next step? Your chatbot will go beyond “find food near me” to providing a full-blown relationship partner that does domestic work and sex.
My hunch is that people will respond to this new world by creating a new form of marriage where people fully integrate their digital “companions” with their physical companions. Like any marriage, the details will depend on values. An “orthodox” marriage may depend on each person minimizing the use of digital helpers, while a “modern” liberal marriage might fully include electronic friends. Future families would be “mixed” in the sense of fully incorporating organic and mechanical people.
Already, we’ve moved from different sex to same sex marriage and, for some, switched from monogamy to polyamory. I don’t see why future families can’t be digital-organic hybrids.
What are your thoughts?
Bottom line: Before you put a ring on it, you may need to plug it in.
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