Sex and the Singularity
In I/O, columnist Lux Alptraum explores how technology intersects with sexuality and relationships. I/O will embrace the uncertainty of our future and help us craft a better tomorrow, together.
In 2004, sex therapist Ian Kerner published his first book, She Comes First. A year later, futurist Ray Kurzweil released a work of his own, called The Singularity Is Near. At first glance, these two books — one a self-help tome educating men about the finer points of cunnilingus, the other a musing on artificial intelligence that predicts an eventual merger of man and machine — have very little in common.
Yet despite their wildly different subject matter, a common thread runs between them. Kerner and Kurzweil both used their bold, confident assertions about the way the world works to cement their positions as thought leaders, experts, and handsomely compensated speakers. And they both peddled overly simplistic narratives that scrubbed nuance and complexity from discussions within their respective fields, reshaping the larger conversation for the worse.
In Kerner’s case, the argument that heterosexual sex should always begin with a woman’s orgasm and that her orgasm should be generated through cunnilingus was rather bold given that Kerner could never be the recipient of the oral sex he so enthusiastically endorsed. It also reinforced the dangerous idea that there is one correct way we should all be structuring our sex lives.
And in Kurzweil’s case, the discussion of a coming singularity — the notion that humans may eventually have their consciousness uploaded into machines — revealed a near-religious belief in the unstoppable progress of tech. He never paused to consider that his own relationship to technology might not be a universal one (among other problems).
Kerner and Kurzweil are hardly the only people who’ve used thinly sourced arguments to launch themselves into the public eye. But people looking for guidance in the men’s respective fields — sexuality and technological soothsaying — seem particularly susceptible to arguments that can be as baseless as they are bold. Why, exactly, do our brains seem to turn off when so-called experts start peddling their theories about sex and the future?
As dissimilar as the two topics may seem, they are linked by one integral quality: a sense of unknowability and mystery.
The future, by definition, is quite literally unknowable. With sex, this sense of unknowability comes to us through the combination of privacy and taboo. Although the internet has greatly opened up our conversations about sex — and, in the case of some porn sites, has even given us a direct view into other people’s bedrooms — many of us are far more limited in our ability to talk honestly about sex than pretty much any other topic.
In both cases, when someone pops up on the national stage claiming to have found all the answers, we’re primed to take them at their word — no matter how ridiculous their claims end up being.
“If people say anything with enough conviction, other people will listen,” says Kate Devlin, author of Turned On: Science, Sex, and Robots, which explores our longstanding cultural obsession with sex robots. “When it comes to the unknowable, people really want to grasp onto something… [I]t’s comforting to think that someone has a grasp on this and we’re not just hurtling blindly into the future” — or, for that matter, into the vulnerability of a sexual relationship.
And when that confident assertion suggests there’s one easy and predictable path forward — good cunnilingus, a computer absorbing your consciousness in the end — we’re that much more susceptible.
“Solutionism, as a mindset, is very attractive,” says sci-fi writer and futurist Madeline Ashby. “The idea that all we need to do is this one thing has always been very attractive. Anyone who’s ever sold a diet plan knows that.”
But our actual behavior — whether we’re talking about what we’re going to be doing in 10 years or tonight when we close the bedroom door — tends to buck against these tidy solutions.
“I learned that lesson pretty hard working on Second Life,” says Kyle Machulis, the creator of Metafetish and Buttplug.io and a longtime commentator in the sex-tech space. Through his years of work tracking the technological advancements of vibrators, erotic apps, and other sex-related tech, Machulis has noted that many people assume there are certain predictable behaviors in human sexuality.
And yet, he explains, “when you are actually given an environment where people can do anything and be anything… you have no fucking clue what they’re going to do or be.” Thanks to Second Life’s openness to adult content, many users have used the platform to explore their wildest sexual fantasies, diving into creative explorations of fetish and BDSM.
“In reality, there are many possible futures. There is no one future,” Ashby says. “My ideal future might not be someone else’s ideal future. In fact, I can guarantee to you that it’s not.”
Good futurism, Ashby tells me, isn’t about making hard-and-fast predictions or asserting you absolutely know what comes next. It’s about analyzing demographic trends and historical patterns and using that information to craft the future you want to see unfold, the same way good sex advice will instruct you to learn about your own needs and desires and those of your partner and synthesize those data sets into a mutually enjoyable — and perhaps utterly unique — sexual experience.
Kerner and Kurzweil may have rocketed to fame with their reductive visions, but if we want better conversations about sex and the future—and, indeed, the future of sex — we’ll need to set aside those confident assertions and embrace something a bit more complicated: uncertainty.
Sex and the Singularity
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