20190422.0430

Yet another piece LinkedIn presented to me is Bernard Marr's 14 April 2019 "How Robots, IoT, and Artificial Intelligence Are Changing How Humans Have Sex." In the article, Marr points out several avenues of current development in the further integration of technology into sex--internet-enabled sex toys, sexbots, and virtual-reality pornography--before moving into consideration of legal issues surrounding such advancement and policy questions that begin to move towards broader social questions. Marr stops short of offering any judgments on the matter, simply noting trends and current developments before noting that things are changing; how they will continue to change and what responses will be appropriate are not yet clear.
I confess to a certain degree of titillation in the piece; although sex sells and various forms of sex work are continually substantial parts of human endeavor and economies, they do not appear to be often discussed on such platforms as LinkedIN. There remains a large degree of prudishness about business in the United States--and US norms still exercise outsized influence on broader discourses--that prevents even such cursory and sober discussions of related issues as Marr's from popping up often. And because there is such a taboo in place, violations of it--even those as innocuous as Marr's article--attract attention, particularly from those so salacious as I am.
Something towards which Marr gestures, and which does need some consideration, is that the increasing integration of technology into sex will further decouple sex from intimacy. The two are certainly not identical--intimacy extends beyond sex, and sex beyond intimacy, in myriad ways--though there is a strong association between them, as well as cultural preferences for their conjoining. Further disassociating them from one another--and, again, making sex more a mechanistic thing is like to do that, if not certain--will have effects on the very nature of family, which is largely defined by consanguinity and privileged sexual relationships. Realigning such things will not be done without struggle--which is not a reason not to do them, but it is folly to deny that such struggles will occur, and that many will be resistant to making changes. Many of us define ourselves in some or large part through familial terms, even those of us who are in the purportedly fragmentary family structures ascribed to and almost necessitate by the demands of work in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Comments on the article suggest that quite a bit of work is needed. What should be discussion of the potential business and legal impacts such changes would make--which would be appropriate to the platform, despite the protestations of some that such content is unfitting--is instead too much judgment of others' sexual preferences. In this, as in much else, what an adult does in private, in his or her own home, with inanimate objects belonging to him or her, is nobody else's concern, and while expressing that such may not be to personal taste is one thing, trying to condemn it overall is quite another--and ultimately fruitless, as the fact that all laws are violated attests.