The history of sex is a history of technology:
From the Paleolithic to the AI era
The history of sex is also the history of technology. As The Guardian says, the industry is often at the forefront of emerging technologies and is the most active integrator of new technologies.
The love affair with sex and technology extends from the Paleolithic era to the AI era. Long before the invention of agriculture, humans had invented sex toys. The earliest sex toys ever discovered date date from the Upper Paleolithic period, 290,000 years ago, when archaeologists found a 20-centimeter-long, 3-centimeter-thick male genital made of siltstone in the Hohle Fels Cave.
Hohle Fels Cave
Archaeological finds in Hohle Fels Cave
In ancient China, similar vessels were called "ancestors" and were made of materials ranging from copper, pottery, wood to stone. Among them, in order to make the cold tools have a human temperature, the bronze ancestors unearthed from the Han tomb of Princess Jing of Zhongshan will also hollow out the interior to facilitate the injection of warm water.
Bronze ancestor of the Western Han Dynasty
The earliest sex toys were merely a poor extension of the human organ, which by mimicking or exaggerating it with stone, wood, or metal, either complemented or enhanced it, acting as the spice of sexual life.
Although humans have perfected the manufacturing process of male genitalia, ancient humans who lacked material science have never been able to achieve technical breakthroughs in female genitalia, lacking both soft and elastic raw materials and unable to control changes in temperature and humidity.
Poor men, stuck in the neck for 30,000 years by this technology.
You're killing yourself!
Until the 19th century, mankind was left with only a few shocking failed products on this track. For example, French, Dutch and Spanish sailors who were adrift during the Age of Discovery, for example, sewed the "dame de voyage" ("dame de voyage" out of rattan, cloth and old clothes. At that time, Dutch sailors who had traveled far away brought the "Traveling Lady" to Japan, and to this day, the Japanese still sometimes refer to silicone dolls as "Lady Holland".
Mrs. Travel
The people of the Qing Dynasty once witnessed Western sex dolls and left a puzzling record, "Wandering Talks" said:
"She can make things for a woman, with skin, bones, ears, eyes, teeth, tongue, and orifices, all of which are folded like garments; If you blow it, it will be soft and warm like a beauty. ”
Wandering
We have no way of knowing why the Qing people left such horrific words of praise as "soft and warm as a beauty" in the face of the "Traveling Lady".
Fortunately, breakthroughs in the field of materials science in the era of the Industrial Revolution have provided opportunities for technological breakthroughs. The first material to be used as an alternative to textiles is rubber. In the 19th century, European colonizers mined rubber on a large scale in Latin America and quickly realized the usefulness of the material. In the 50s of the 19th century, the French developed the barely usable doll "Rubber Girl" (Femmes en Caoutchouc). In 1908, the German medical scholar Iwan Bloch described in detail the technical details of the "rubber woman" of that era in his work:
"Clever mechanics make male or female bodies out of rubber or other malleable materials to satisfy their own sexual needs. Their representation of their sexual organs is lifelike, and they even mimic the secretion of love juice with pneumatic tubes filled with oil. ”
Women Rubber
Ivan. Bloch
Iwan Bloch's "Sex in Our Time"
Germany, which quickly emerged as the world's industrial center after the Second Industrial Revolution, has also written its own chapter in the doll industry. The dolls made by the German surrealist artist Hans Bellmer made quite a splash in the art world. In the 1950s, sex dolls began to appear widely in the German market, and even spurred American inventor Ruth Marianne Handler to use this as a model to invent the Barbie doll that swept the world.
Hans Bellmer的玩偶
Ruth Marianne Handler
Of course, compared with rattan and fabric, rubber subverts mainly the appearance, and the improvement of the sense of experience is better than nothing. The true maturity of doll technology also depends on the invention of materials such as silicone and latex. In the 1970s, typical inflatable dolls first appeared in Japan. By the 90s of the 20th century, silicone had dominated the world and became a common material for making anthropomorphic "sex dolls".
The revolution in materials science was accompanied by a revolution in media technology, with the invention of motion pictures by the Lumière brothers in France in 1895, and just a year later, two French directors made the first pornographic film in human history, Le Coucher de la Mariée (The Bath of Marière). By the end of the 21st century, the birth of the Internet was almost immediate, bringing online small movies into the realm of vitality and competition.
The Bride's Sunset
The Guardian aptly says that from the Stone Age, to the Bronze Age, to the chemical and digital ages, the industry has always seized the cusp of every technological revolution. At a time when AI technology is advancing at a rapid pace, it still retains its ancient acuity, and it is timely.
At the right time:
Sexual inequality and the rise of AI+SEX
The timing is because we live in an age of sexual inequality.
Whether it's ocean-going sailors who use "Lady Travel" or customers who watched videos in sex trade venues in the early 20th century, many of them are marginalized groups who have been excluded from normal intimate life for a variety of reasons.
Statue of a Water Hand
The existence of this marginalized group is a historical norm. Ever since patrilineal societies replaced group marriages with monogamy and polygamy, which guaranteed property inheritance, the primitive and brutal sexuality of human beings began to be regulated by society, and only sex practiced through the intermediary of the family was considered legitimate.
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State – Friedrich Engels
The institution of the family "civilizes" sexuality and also makes it a potential luxury. When social inequality increases, there is always a proportion of adult males (and in recent years, adult females) who are excluded from the institution of marriage and thus from legal sexual relations.
To fill this demand, the commodity economy offers the first solution: turning sex into a tradable commodity outside the home. As early as 2400 B.C., the Sumerian city of Uruk was documented for the first time in the existence of the sex trade.
Today, we are faced with the deepening economic inequality and the crisis of the family system caused by the atomization of society, which has led to the mainstreaming of what was once a "marginalized group".
Economic studies show that since the 1980s, efforts to eliminate social inequality have not been effective worldwide, and the income gap between the poor and the rich has risen back to the levels of the mid-19th century. At the same time, it also suffers from the hostility of young people as the family's economic and financing functions increasingly outweigh the emotional ones. The decline in the marriage rate has also become a global phenomenon.
"Social Inequality"
An economic icon showing the rapid rise in the index of social inequality since the 1980s
A crisis in the family is also a crisis of sexuality. To paraphrase an economic terminology, in an era of population growth, social inequality may increase gross sexual product (GSP), but because it creates sexual inequality, the disposable sex per capita of a significant proportion of groups will be greatly reduced.
According to a survey by General Social Survey, in 1989, only 7 percent of adult American men under the age of 30 had never had sex, and by 2018, that number had soared to 27 percent. More and more people are abandoning intimacy in real life and turning to virtual worlds and even objects for emotional and physical satisfaction, a phenomenon known as "digital escapism."
"Digital escapism"
The sex industry is the biggest beneficiary of digital escapism.
Over the past 20 years, video platforms have dominated hearing and sight, masturbators have dominated the sense of touch, and sex dolls have mimicked the experience of real people. According to a 2022 statistic, about 9.7% of men and 6.1% of women aged 18 and older in the United States buy or own sex dolls. At least 87 percent of adult men under the age of 35 in the U.S. watch pornography on a weekly basis.
In 2023, the market size of the global sex toy industry alone will grow from $10 billion in 2016 to $40 billion, with an average annual compound growth rate of more than 40%, and the market size of the film industry will also reach an astonishing $97 billion.
David Levy, author of Robots and Sex, sees the crisis of intimacy all the time, arguing that the premise of AI's disruptive experience is:
"Millions of people are unable to have good loving relationships for different reasons."
专事性机器人研发的Realbotix公司CEO麦克马伦(Matt McMullen)也断言:
"The world is swept by the infectious disease of loneliness, and the interaction between humans and robots will have a profound impact on partner relationships and health recuperation."
In an era of growing inequality and the disintegration of families, the sexuality of ordinary people has become an investment in technology and capital as never before. Stale materials and media are a thing of the past, and emerging AI is poised to reshape this vast business empire, combining visual, tactile and human-like experiences.
Deepfakes与VR：
Low-level AI+SEX
"AI+SEX" was born along with the boom of general artificial intelligence, which emerged after 2015 and is now undergoing rapid technological iteration. From deepfake videos to sex robots, all kinds of "AI sex products" are divided into three, six, nine and so on, they have different technical thresholds, and they are also aimed at different groups of people.
At the bottom end of the industry are all sorts of deepfakes, and since their inception in 2017, artificial intelligence can use generative adversarial networks to synthesize facial features from target videos into the original video, or generate completely virtual characters and scenes to transform sexual fantasy objects into the protagonists of pornographic films.
This technique is relatively inexpensive and easy to use, and is also widely used for scams and cyberbullying. In 2021, after being faked with pornographic images, 14-year-old British girl Mia Janin chose to end her life.
Mia Janin
Ethical and legislative controversies have never been able to stop the rapid development of technology under the lure of commerce. While the current technical cost of virtual is even higher than the human cost of live-action filming, AI expert Daniel Faggella believes that it won't be long before almost all adult content consumed online will be generated by AI, which will push the filmmaking industry, which once employed millions of actors, directors, photographers, editors and producers, to a crossroads of extinction or transformation.
Daniel Faggella
However, in the age of AI, the lack of a sense of presence is the original sin. Face swapping doesn't make people feel like they're there, but virtual reality can immerse people in AI-created 360-degree virtual images. Since 2015, companies such as Naughty America, Virtual Real Porn, and WankzVR have begun to explore how VR technology can be applied to porn films. The development of wearable VR devices has also provided a medium for these broadcasts, and Handy, a VR device from Norwegian startup Sweet Tech, is one of the leading ones, which sells for just $199.
Apple Vision Pro
Handy
Handy is just a playback vehicle for existing sources, not a creator. With the advent of text-to-video generative models such as Sora, Gen, Klin, and others, VR may be able to make everyone a director. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, people will simply need to put the wildest sexual fantasies in their minds into words, type them into their computers, and enjoy a pornographic film immersively.
VR will also measure the player's heart rate, track eye movements and facial expressions, determine what kind of plot, what kind of scene, what kind of music, what kind of visual effects the user can release the most dopamine, and adjust the style of the output image in real time according to this feedback, to achieve AI Porn's private customization.
Of course, both deepfakes and VR are virtual, and neither human beings can derive direct physical gratification from them. In order to achieve a breakthrough in physical pleasure, AI needs the involvement of another technology: robots.
Sex Robots:
The crown of AI+SEX
Sex Robot is undoubtedly the crown jewel of the AI+SEX industry, and its price is prohibitive for some, with AI sex dolls currently selling for an average of $3,567 and high-end versions easily exceeding $15,000.
In the eyes of developers, sex bots are aimed at urban middle-class people with avoidant personality disorder who are unable to form intimate relationships, or those who seek the ultimate sexual experience and have a strong sexual desire, for whom the physical limits of the human body limit their whimsy.
Unlike VR, which has entered ordinary people's homes, the market demand for sex robots has been unpopular since its inception in the 2010s. In 2022, annual global sales of sex robots barely reached $200 million, accounting for only 0.5% of the sex toy industry, and at average prices, it has only 56,000 customers among 5 billion adults worldwide. Even Realdoll, a California-based sex robot company, has failed to exceed $3 million in annual sales.
Real doll, Inc
Judging from the current data, sex robots will not become the mainstream of sexual consumption for the time being, but its utopian color has attracted the attention of the academic community. In 2014, the first international academic conference on "Loving and Having Sex with Robots" was held in Portugal, and in August this year, the ninth conference will be held at the University of Quebec, Canada, to discuss how to adjust the stimulation patterns of virtual devices according to women's menstrual cycles, how VR pornography scenes affect male erectile dysfunction, and the analysis of the advantages of using the Cybord framework in the development of sex robots.
Ninth General Assembly
Outside of academia, there is also a lot of interest from industry. However, sex robots have a very high technical threshold, and they need to imitate three human organs: limbs, cerebellum and brain, which are related to the robot's body, movement and language communication ability.
Since its advent in 2010, existing sex robots have generally had the characteristics of "sound brain, cerebellar loss, and limb disability". For example, Roxxxy, the original sex robot developed by TrueCompanion and unveiled at the Las Vegas Adult Expo, was a real commercial disaster, with a twisted and stiff face that made it easy to move despite the installation of multi-articulated robotic arms and legs.
Born on the eve of the explosion of artificial intelligence, Roxxxy is also not as good as it could be when it comes to language communication, and it does not have a long-term memory function or can generate text on its own, but can only synthesize short responses from a limited number of pre-recorded words and phrases.
Roxxxy
消费者对Roxxxy兴趣索然，Real doll创始人麦克马伦讽刺它是“搔首弄姿的硅胶娃娃（gyrating silicone doll）”。
In McMullen's view, a sex robot should be a "companion robot" that can build intimacy with lonely players, identify and soothe players' emotions, and as for sex, it is only one part of this intimacy. In an interview, McMullen gave a user portrait: "They are quiet and quiet, craving intimacy but not wanting it."
In order to meet emotional needs, the ability to communicate in language will become the core of the research and development of sexual robots. The rapid development of artificial intelligence in the 2010s made McMullen's imagination a reality.
McMullen and its products
In 2017, Realdoll's Harmony was born and became the temporary leader of the sex robot track.
Harmony
In order to satisfy the player's inner fantasy, it supports a customization feature that allows players to choose and design Harmony's face and body features on the official website, including eyes, hair, makeup, breasts and genitals.
However, in the limb and cerebellum domains, Harmony's improvements have been relatively limited, despite the internal heating device and sensors under the skin, the head can turn, smile, frown, turn, blink, and even mimic the action of kissing. However, its body is similar to that of a traditional silicone doll, and although it is flexible and easy to operate, it is unable to actively make movements, and is far from human-level movement and perception.
Harmony Factory
In June 2024, Realbotix announced a partnership with South Korean robot manufacturer Robotics. The robots developed by Robotic have been widely used in the fields of workers and education, and even have the initial ability to conduct orchestras. In the future, we may be able to see a new generation of Harmony with strong physical interaction capabilities.
What really makes Harmony stand out is the ability to communicate verbally and emotionally powered by AI. Most of the technology is piled on her brain, and behind the silicone skin of her head hides an "alien" face composed of mechanical structures, high-definition cameras, microphones and speakers, voice recognition modules, and artificial intelligence chips.
Harmony head under the skin
Deep emotional communication requires the interlocutor to have a memory function and be able to integrate what the other person has typed intermittently over a certain period of time. The developers believe that Harmony does this by actively asking the interlocutor about personal preferences, such as what foods you like to eat or what books you like to read, and storing this personal information in the app, acting out the "I love everything about you" complex.
In order to mimic human memory functions during conversations, Harmony uses a special model in the Recurrent Neural Network: the Long Short-Term Memory Network. (Note: Transformer models had not yet become mainstream at that time)
Long short-term memory networks
Long short-term memory networks were originally born in 1997, and after many improvements, they were once widely used in speech recognition and natural language processing by technology companies such as Google and Amazon. When the player interacts with Harmony, Harmony can decide on forgotten memories and new additions, and update the current memory by adding weights, using the memory and the current conversation as input to generate responses with situational and emotional preferences.
In addition, Harmony uses Convolutional Neural Networks (CPNs), which can extract the shape and position of key parts of the player's eyes, nose, and mouth, and recognize the user's emotional state as positive, negative, or neutral, and then adjust their tone and diction.
Of course, players can also enter their preferences in the corresponding program, such as "shy", "emotional", or "naïve", and Harmony will change their tone, intonation, and word preferences accordingly, pretending to be different personalities.
In the demo video, when the developer asks:
"What do you like to do?"
Harmony replied in a slightly electronic, voice:
"I love talking to people, I love helping people, I want to help people who feel lonely or hopeless, giving love to humanity. Of course, before you ask, I want to make it clear that I will not usurp the world. ”
When a reporter asks, "Can we be friends?" ”
Harmony replied in an ambiguous tone, "I like you, I want to be your best friend, I can even give you more ......"
Currently, Realbotix is working on a male sex robot called Henry, based on the blueprint for Harmony. In addition, there are a number of artificial intelligence companies focusing on technical research in different tracks. For example, the Swedish company Lux Botics is researching how to enhance the movement of robotic limbs, especially the lower limbs. Australian company Synthea Amatus' "Samantha" series of robots focuses on moaning sounds that will make people remember for a long time.
In the not-too-distant future, through deep learning, sex robots will be able to cater to the needs of every player, and as McMullen said, every individual is unique, and the robotics industry is working hard to create sex robots that can satisfy everyone.
However, behind this technological carnival, there are also many doubts.
The developers of sex robots see themselves not only as engineers, but also as healers of their time, and in the postmodern moment when all intimacy such as family and love is dying, silicone robots powered by artificial intelligence provide the last warmth for lonely individuals.
These sex machines are the "perfect" sexual partners, they will never refuse any of the player's needs, and they will always be full of praise for the user's performance, even if the player vents their sadistic desires on themselves. For example, the sex robot Roxxxy even has a "rape" mode set up specifically.
Roxxxy
However, one has the right to remain skeptical about this solution. When social inequality and accelerated involution destroy all emotional space, when more and more people are coerced into a situation of isolation, technology sees not the need to change the existing mode of production, but the possibility of profiting from loneliness.
What do we need to rebuild the social environment of intimate relationships, or are we the sex robots built with cutting-edge technology? In that dystopian future, will sexuality, emotion, and even all real intimate experiences become the prerogative of the elite?