Category Archives: Sexy Future

July 19, 2017 · 6:54 am

Sex Robots, The Risks, And The Impact On Our Sex Lives

Talking about fascism and repressive governments is rarely sexy. I’ve yet to meet anyone whose panties ever got wet while talking about regressive free speech policies. You know what is fun, sexy topic to talk about, though? That’s right, I’m talking about sex robots again. Can you think of a better way to lighten the mood after all this political talk?

Traditionally, I don’t need a lot of reasons to talk about sex robots on this blog. I’ve even been known to make any excuse to talk about how sex robots will effect us, whether it’s how they’ll affect the prostitution industry or how they’ll make us better people. Granted, I do want to talk about something sexier than George Orwell, but there actually is a relevant reason for bringing up this sexy topic again.

It’s relevant because it tends to happen with all new technology to some extent. When there’s a clear trend emerging, it tends to generate this wave of irrational fear regarding its impact on society. We saw that with television when people though Elvis’ hips were part of a communist conspiracy to corrupt America. It’s only a matter of time before we see that with sex robots.

As such, it should surprise precisely no one that some people are already stoking the same fears about sex robots as their parents did with Elvis’ hips. This past week, the Salvation Army actually brought up the issue of sex robots and not in a very sexy way. These were their exact words.

It believes the technology could result in more people brought into the UK illegally for sexual exploitation instead of lessening demand for sex workers, the Birmingham Mail reports.

That’s not entirely surprising. Remember, the Salvation Army is a Christian organization. They do wonderful work, but religion have a long and stories history when it comes to sexual fear-mongering. The fact the Catholic Church still considers masturbation a sin in the age of internet porn shows how regressive religion can be on sexual matters.

It’s not just religion, though. Other more pragmatic organizations that don’t rely on people breeding uncontrollably expressed some concerns as well. A paper by Responsible Robotics, a non-profit that contemplates the sexy and non-sexy impact of robots on society, issued a paper called “Our Sexual Future With Robots” that expressed concerns similar to those of the Salvation Army. Here are some highlights.

“When we look at the question of whether or not sex robots could help to prevent sex crimes, there is major disagreement. On one side there are those who believe that expressing disordered or criminal sexual desires with a sex robot would satiate them to the point where they would not have the desire to harm fellow humans.”

“Many others believe that this would be an indulgence that could encourage and reinforce illicit sexual practices. This may work for a few but it is a very dangerous path to tread. It may be that allowing people to live out their darkest fantasies with sex robots could have a pernicious effect on society and societal norms and create more danger for the vulnerable.”

It sounds pretty dire. Then again, those fears about Elvis’ hips were pretty dire as well. Fears about cartoon violence, video games, and comic books were pretty dire as well. That’s not to say the concerns from Responsible Robotics and the Salvation Army are on the same level, but this kind of sentiment is nothing new.

I can see the logic behind these fears on some levels. The idea that people who fulfill their sexual needs with robots will somehow become socially isolated makes intuitive sense. It’s easy to imagine some creepy guy spending his every waking out in a windowless basement, acting out the most nauseating fantasies ever conceived with a sex robot that is programmed to be completely obedient.

It’s easy, but as is often the case with most fear-mongering, it focuses on an incomplete picture, of sorts. It simplifies and generalizes the impact that such a profound advancement would have on society. Given the sheer breadth of human society, that’s a crude, shallow understanding of the subject at best.

New technology always negatively affects some people. The simple advance of texting generated approximately 330,000 traffic-related injuries accidents in 2010 alone. It’s hard to know how many injuries sex robots will cause, but chances are it’ll be more than zero and heavily inflated if done while driving.

Despite the clear and documented harms of texting while driving, there’s no effort to un-invent the technology. It’s already here and it’s exceedingly profitable. Since the sex industry is already worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the incentives for sex robots are just too great to ignore, no matter how much religious organizations condemn it.

That’s not to say there won’t be issues. There are always issues with new technology. As advanced as smartphones had become, we still had faulty tech as recently as last year that caused some phones to explode. It’s terrifying enough to think about your phone exploding in your pocket. It’s hard to imagine how terrifying it would be if a sex robot malfunctioned in such a away.

Being an erotica/romance writer, I like to think I can imagine more than most. I also like to think that after hearing so many of the same arguments about video games, violent TV shows, and what not, I can sift the legitimate concerns from the agenda-driven fear-mongering.

Make no mistake. Sex robots will undermine certain peoples’ agendas. There are a lot of industries that cater to lonely, sexually frustrated men and women. It’s easier to convince a lonely, sexually frustrated person that a particular product will alleviate those feelings. Every marketing department in the world knows things get tougher when customers are happy, content, and satisfied.

There will also be cases of people who are already unhinged to begin with becoming even more unhinged due to sex robots. The rock band, Judas Priest, found that out the hard way in 1985 when two depressed teenagers listened to their music and committed suicide. While the band was found not liable for the deaths, it was still one case too many for the fear-mongers.

As soon as sex robots become more mainstream and more affordable, there will likely be a similar incident. Some poor loner will seek an outlet with a sex robot and somehow that will exacerbate, if that’s not too loaded a word, issues that are already festering inside his brain.

It could lead to people who become so isolated, they never leave their home again and end up dead.

It could lead to people who are so socially awkward that just being in public triggers a panic attack.

It could lead to people who can only have a functioning sexual relationship with a robot they can control and not a human being.

These are all possibilities and if I had to bet money on it, I’d say there will be at least one such case. Like the Judas Priest controversy, though, it’ll only take one to justify ramping up the fear-mongering. We may very well see governments and advocacy groups seeking to ban sex robots altogether or at least regulate them.

Seeing as how there’s too much money to be made in sex robots, it’s unlikely they’ll be banned. Chances are there will be some form of regulation or standards. Since the government is so uptight when it comes to regulating sexual matters, it’s more likely that the industry itself will try to regulate its own affairs. The last thing the industry needs is prudish bureaucrats telling sex doll manufacturers how big a pair of breasts can be.

It’s hard to say just how the sex robot industry will manifest. Unlike smartphones and TV, there’s far less precedent. While we do have sex dolls that are extremely realistic, we’ve yet to produce a sex robot that’s truly indistinguishable from the real thing and has a comparable measure of intelligence.

It will happen, though. The financial incentives are too strong and people are too horny. There will be issues. There will be reservations. However, we humans have proven incredibly adaptable over the centuries when it comes to bold new technology.

We adapted to cars and planes. We adapted to vaccines and contraception. We adapted to sexting and internet porn. We’ll find a way to adapt to sex robots. When people are that horny, they’ll find a way. It’s a beautiful, sexy thing that brings tears of joy to an erotica/romance writer’s eye.

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Tagged as coaching, future, future of love, future society, futurism, human sexuality, intimacy, love, orgasm gap, orgasms, Real Dolls, romance, sex, sex education, sex in society, sex robot, sex robots, sexual health, sexy

June 26, 2017 · 6:58 am

(Possible) Taboos Of The Future

Whenever I talk about the future on this blog, which is an awful lot for an erotica/romance writer, I always feel I need to make the same disclosure. I’ve made it before whenever I try to make predictions about the future. I still feel it’s worth making because I don’t want to give the impression that I’m smarter than I actually am.

Here’s the honest truth. Nobody knows for sure what’s going to happen in the future. Nobody knows for sure what kind of technological breakthroughs there will be. Nobody knows for sure how our understanding of physics, biology, and chemistry will change. Nobody knows for sure whether Kardashians will be broke and sell insurance tomorrow.

It’s the same advice I gave everyone frustrated by news, politics, and everything in between. Nobody knows anything. They can make educated guesses that may or may not be accurate. Some are far less educated than others. At the end of the day, though, nobody really knows for sure.

I say all this because I’m going to take a moment to predict and/or speculate on what sort of taboos we’ll have in the future. I talked a bit about taboos and why they exist. No matter how advanced we get as a society, relatively speaking, there will always be sort of taboo operating behind our social norms. Most of those norms will have to do with sex, gender, and how much poor people are screwed over.

Now, those dynamics might change when technology like brain implants or smart blood become sufficiently advanced. They might change even more if we adopt policies like a universal basic income. For our entire existence, as a species, we’ve been at the mercy of our caveman brains, whose wiring is basically set by the painfully slow processes of evolution. Once that changes, then all bets are off.

With that massive flaw in the dynamics of taboos, I’m still going to try and make a few predictions. If you think I’m stupid, dead wrong, or just plain trolling, then please know that I’m at the mercy as the same limits as everyone else. I’m just as capable of making a stupid predictions, just like the idiots who thought the internet was a fad.

So, with no illusions as to the accuracy of my predictions, here are the taboos that I believe we’ll see in the latter parts of the 21st century. Some of them deal with technology. Some of them deal with social policies. Yes, some even deal with sex. I’m sure that will shock no one. Whatever they involve, the issues are the same. These will be things that will carry with them an odd, but unique stigma for future generations.

Taboo #1: Having Babies The Old Fashioned Way

I’ve talked about artificial wombs before, primarily as a means of leveling the playing field between genders. Initially, the technology will be used to save infants born prematurely and help infertile couples have children. This is all technology that’s in development right now and we’ll likely see it refined within our lifetime.

It’s when you push it out beyond that when things get really interesting. At some point, using artificial wombs will be healthier, more efficient, and more convenient than old fashioned birthing. It’ll probably be a lot more comfortable too. Talk to any woman who has ever endured the joys of childbirth without pain killers and they’ll tell you how much they’d love to see technology like this advance.

So if there’s a method for making babies that’s safer, easier, and involves much less screaming, why would anyone opt to make babies the old fashioned way? That’s like people who opt not to drink unpasteurized milk, which is fraught with a lot of health risks.

We may come to a point where people who give birth naturally will be seen as irresponsible, reckless, and downright weird. Whenever the health of babies is an issue, taboos tend to follow. No matter how advanced we get as a species, our concern for the health of infants will still be an issue.

Taboo #2: Identifying As A Gender And NOT Going Through A Complete Transition

This taboo is something we’re already seeing, to some extent, with ongoing transgender issues. At the moment, most of those issues involve discrimination, harassment, and the “ick factor” that a lot of minorities tend to deal with at some point in their history. Those issues are relevant for a reason, but that reason will change considerably in the future.

At the moment, sexual reassignment surgery is a messy, expensive, tedious process that’s full of various risks. It’s also not entirely perfect. Transgender women still can’t give birth and transgender men still can’t father children. They can look like their preferred gender all they want, but the biological mechanisms within still won’t be the same.

With advances in biotechnology, especially advances like smart blood, we may advance to a state where we can basically shape-shift our bodies the same way Mystique from the X-men does. If someone wants to be a particular gender, then the technology will be there for them to make that transition so completely that nobody would ever know they went through such a transition.

When that time comes, the act of being transgender won’t be taboo. However, those who identify as another gender, but don’t go through a transition, may get their share of odd glances. That would be like someone offering you a limb you once lost and then refusing it. If you can be whatever gender you want to be, why would you continue to live in the wrong body?

Taboo #3: Allowing Yourself To Be Sick

This also ties into biotechnology and the advances we’ll make in fighting disease. Tools like CRISPR are already in development. There may come a time in the near future when nearly all disease, especially the infectious kind, is effectively cured.

So when those diseases are gone, why does anyone get sick? Why would anyone even allow themselves to get sick? Throughout history, society has had all sorts of rules and rituals as to how they treat the sick. A society full of sick people is an unstable society and it’s always in everyone’s interest to minimize that.

Like with those who drink raw milk or religious groups who refuse modern medicine, there may be a segment of people who choose not to use tools like CRISPR or smart blood. When those people get sick, they’ll likely be major anomalies in a society where most of these diseases are cured. Like someone getting measles again, it’s a dangerous act that will likely carry plenty of stigma.

Taboo #4: NOT Being On Some Form Of Contraception

This is where our sex lives come into play. Admit it, you know I was going to get to something like this. I’ve talked a lot about contraception and the future of birth control, often with plenty of side-notes as to how this is going to affect our sex lives and gender dynamics. Naturally, that’s going to include plenty of taboos.

In a future with artificial wombs to grow the population, the mere act of not being on contraception will be inherently risky. Pregnancy already kills a lot of women, even today with all our advanced medicine. In a future where we don’t need women to put themselves at that kind of risk to grow the population, why would society even encourage it?

While this may be outrageous for those currently locked in the pro-life/pro-choice debate, technology will change the dynamics. If birth control technology gets to a point where it’s safe, effective, and cheap, then it requires people to go out of their way to avoid using it. Like people going out of their way to avoid seat-belts, we’ll see that as irresponsible, reckless behavior.

This would definitely have huge implications for our sex lives. In a world where contraception is the default setting for everyone, people would likely treat sex as something separate from reproduction. We’ve already done this with food, thanks to technology, so it’s possible sex will undergo a similar process.

Like someone who tries to poke holes in condoms or get pregnant from a partner, which does happen, people who forego contraception will likely become deviants who disrupt the norms surrounding sex and reproduction. Deviants often put a face on taboos and it’s rarely a pretty face.

Taboo #5: NOT Being Healthy Or Physically Fit

In the same way that not being on contraception will be taboo, not being fit could also become an anomaly that someone has to go out of their way to achieve. That’s hard to imagine now with obesity being a major issue throughout the industrialized world. Right now, the weight-loss industry is a multi-billion dollar industry that’s full of fads, diets, and pills that turn peoples’ insides into raging tire fire.

In the future, advances like smart blood will make obesity nothing more than a subject of niche genre porn. Even those without eight-pack abs can still be healthy and fit because enhancements to our biology and brains will make that as easy as downing a tub of ice cream on a hot summer day.

Biotechnology will basically allow us to hack the biology of our bodies and make it so we don’t have to eat and work out like the Rock to be fit. We just need something like smart blood in our bodies to let it know that we want it to look a particular way and anything that might make us not look that way should go straight to the colon.

In that future, one where women all look as fit as Jennifer Lawrence and men are all as toned as Hugh Jackman, being unfit and unhealthy would be a conscious choice rather than struggle. It would also make people more prone to health issues and illnesses that would burden a society full of beautiful people. That would definitely make it a taboo.

I’m not saying those who opts not to use this technology to look as sexy as possible are wrong or bad people. They may have legitimate, personal reasons for doing so. However, that choice makes the society around them seem less healthy and less sexy. That’s usually an easy way to become taboo and not look good while doing it.

These are just a few ideas. Again, it’s very likely they’ll be dead wrong. Most reading this blog might not even live long enough to see some of them. Either way, it’s fairly certain that we’ll still have taboos in the future that seem weird to every other generation that ever lived. It’s just a matter of how weird they get.

With that in mind, I’d love to hear what others think might be taboo in the future. Please let me know in the comments. If enough people submit them, I’ll do another post on this subject. I’d like this blog to be more interactive. This is just one opportunity for doing so.

How Immortal Humans (Might) Make Love

At every wedding or marriage ceremony, we’ve all heard those sweet, romantic words. Two people stand before friend, family, and whatever deity they happen to worship, and pledge to love, honor, and be faithful to one another until death do they part. It’s a powerful romantic sentiment, one that holds a special place in our culture and our understanding of love.

It’s also a sentiment that’s becoming increasingly hallow because the divorce rates throughout the world are pretty staggering. It runs anywhere between 40 and 65 percent. If every promise someone made to you had a failure at that level, you’d never leave your house without a lawyer and branding iron.

As rough and agonizing as divorce can be, it exists for a legitimate reason. Staying married to the same person your entire life is hard. I’m not just talking about staying sexually monogamous either. Being with only one person, putting all your romantic and emotional energy into a single individual, is not easy. You’re putting your entire heart into one person’s hand and trusting them not to crush it.

It didn’t used to be that hard. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that it was a fairly pragmatic arrangement and by that, I mean as recently as the 1950s. I’ve talked about the history of marriage before and at the heart of that history is a sort of romantic pragmatism, if that’s even the right word.

For most of human civilization that have some form of marriage arrangements, people lived on farms or in small towns, rarely venturing more than fifty miles from their homes. Most of the time, people didn’t even choose their spouse. Their parents chose for them.

You weren’t expected to love each other. You only really had to tolerate each other and be willing to have children. Those are some pretty low standards, but that was all it took for a successful marriage, so to speak. Sexual fidelity was necessary for the woman to ensure the passage of property, but it was pretty much expected for men to have a few mistresses here and there.

Even with mistresses, this form of marriage worked because it was practical. Staying with one person your whole life made sense in a world where you barely ever left the farm or the town you were born in. Getting divorced, even if there was some cheating on the sides, just didn’t make sense. It was more trouble than it was worth.

Then, society changed, technology improved, and civilization revamped its idea of marriage. Instead of the low standards and cold pragmatics of the past, we needed our marriages to be built around the kind of ideal love that’s been in every Disney movie since 1944. We need a lover who is our heart, our soul, and our everything. They need to be the personification of a Barry White song mixed with a One Direction song.

Those are some mighty high expectations and I’ve mentioned how unreasonable they are. Add a little thing called “No-Fault Divorce” to the list, a legal term that rips men’s hearts out through their wallets, and suddenly that ideal of love is much trickier. Stories about couples who have been together for 70 years are endearing, but that’s because they’re the exception and not the norm.

There are still a lot of flaws to dissect in our current understanding of love and marriage. I’ll probably do more posts about that in the future. For this one, though, I’m afraid I have to dig deeper into those flaws and the implications are not good. I may end up painting a sad, unsexy picture about the future of our love lives, but bear with me. I’m going to try and inject a little hope and sexiness towards the end.

I’ve often speculated on how emerging technology like brain implants, biotechnology, and bionic genitals will improve and redefine our love lives, including the sexy parts. In my recent discussions about boredom among immortals, it revealed a relevant issue that we’re going to have to address at some point.

In a future where we can live for centuries, maintain our youth, and continue to enjoy a robust sex life, how will we go about love, sex, and marriage? It’s a legitimate question because there’s no way our current system can work. That system is failing without the impact of bionic genitals. What hope does it have when lovers become full-blown shape-shifters?

Beyond the way we look and our ability to have sex with bionic body parts, the immortal factor may be the trickiest. That’s because, as I’ve pointed out with characters like Vandal Savage and Superman, an extremely long life makes people more prone to crippling boredom. When people become bored, they tend to become dispassionate and that’s not a recipe for a functioning romance.

Couples already get bored with each other with stunning regularity. What happens when those couples start living to be 500-years-old and never get too old to attract new partners? The idea of “till death do us part” suddenly becomes woefully impractical. Despite what vampire novels might have us believe, monogamy for an immortal just isn’t practical. It might not even be that romantic, in the long run.

Romance and practicality aside, it’s still important to maintain those passionate connections between people, even if they are immortal. Without them, they’ll inevitably end up like Vandal Savage, who comes to see humans as aging meat-bags in dire need of his exploitation.

However much we enhance our bodies and mind, we humans are still a social species. We are also a passionate species. We seek love, intimacy, and connection with one another. No matter what the economics may say or what religious zealots may decree, we’re driven to find love and connection. When we become immortal super-humans, complete with smart blood and bionic genitals, that won’t change.

That begs the question, which also happens to inspire another sexy thought experiment. How exactly does a society of immortal humans go about making love and forging romantic bonds? That’s a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer, especially for an erotica/romance writer. If I could predict the future that well, I’d play the stock market and become a billionaire by next Tuesday.

However, being an erotica/romance writer, I’m pretty adept at coming up with sexy ideas with plenty of romance mixed in. Anyone who has read my novels knows this all too well. So here’s how I imagine a future society of immortal humans will make love.

Scenario 1: The Monogamy Scenario (But Not In The Way You Think)

As much as I poke fun at monogamy on this blog, I don’t discount its value or its beauty. I also don’t think it’s going away anytime soon. Even among immortals, there will always be certain individuals for whom monogamy just works. With human enhancement, though, it gets a badly-needed upgrade.

The monogamy I’m talking about isn’t the same monogamy you associate with your grandparents who have been married since the stone age. Monogamy in this, context, may also include sharing a mind link, not unlike Cyclops and Jean Grey of the X-men. Two people could be so committed to each other that they want to link minds and stay linked, effectively becoming a single conscious entity.

It may sound creepy, but it also takes monogamy to a whole new level. It also makes use of brain implant technology, like the ones being developed by Neuralink. Monogamy like this could be deeper on a level that would impress the Edward Cullens and Bella Swans of the world. It would be, by our understanding, a perfect monogamous union. You might think their sex would get boring, but it wouldn’t matter to them.

Scenario 2: The Family Scenario (Not THAT Kind Of Family)

Don’t flex your gag-reflex just yet. When I say “family,” I’m not talking about incest. I’ll leave that to the very specific, very targeted genres of porn that specialize in that sort of thing. For the purposes of this scenario, I’m going to use family in a way that it hasn’t been used before, at least outside of a creepy sex cult.

The family scenario focuses on a small group of tight-knit individuals. It may never be more than a dozen people of varying genders. These people may or may not have some sort of mind link via brain implant, sort of like the monogamy scenario. The difference is that this small group shares a collective loving bond.

They exchange intimacy, sex, and love amongst themselves. There aren’t any couples or hookups, per se. There’s no such thing as an affair or cheating. They all see themselves as a family unit, loving and supporting each other in addition to meeting their sexual and emotional needs. In a future of immortal, enhanced humans, I think this would probably be the most common scenario.

Scenario 3: The Community Scenario (Kind Of What It Sounds Like)

This one is less suggestive. It means almost what you think it means. In this scenario, larger groups of individuals, each with enhanced bodies, live or connect in a common way. That connection is fairly loose, though. They opt to maintain most of their individual autonomy, but they see themselves as part of one romantic unit.

Traditional, non-enhanced brains can’t function in that way without calling it an orgy. Brains that are enhanced, in that respect, are better able to see themselves as part of a larger unit. It could be among hundreds, if not thousands of people. They may or may not live in a similar area. However, they would all see themselves as romantically linked, just as most monogamous lovers today see themselves romantically linked.

There would be plenty of variety, in terms of sex. Finding a sexual and romantic outlet would be almost casual. It would be like a private sex club, of sorts, one where you get to skip all the small talk and flirting. With enhanced brains and bodies, it’s that much more effective. It allows for larger groups of people to function romantically without becoming a Jerry Springer episode.

I imagine a scenario like this would be pretty messy. It would strain even the breadth of human enhancement. For certain individuals, though, namely the ones who want to still be individuals, it would definitely appeal. They get the same love and sex they need. They also get to be their own person, even if they’re an asshole sometimes.

Again, these are just a few scenarios conjured by one aspiring erotica/romance writer and without the aid of a brain-enhancing neural implant, no less. There’s only so much I can speculate and even less I can do to speculate accurately. I’m good at thinking kinky, sexy thoughts and telling kinky, sexy stories with those thoughts. That limits my ability to predict the future, especially a future with enhanced brains.

However accurate, or inaccurate, my scenarios might be, the way we make love with our enhanced selves will be a big part of who we are and the society we inhabit. Chances are it’ll be nothing like anything we imagine and it’s entirely likely that ever religious group and social conservative will hate it.

It will happen, though. If history has taught us one thing, it’s that we’re constantly adapting to the crazy new situations we create for ourselves. Part of being human is seeking connection, love, and intimacy with others. As we embrace new technology, new ways of thinking, and new ways of life, our ability and capacity for love, sex, and everything in between will adapt with it.

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Tagged as anti-aging, being in love, biotechnology, committment, divorce, emerging technology, erotica, falling in love, future of love, future of sex, future sex, futurism, human society, immortality, longevity, love, marriage, relationships, romance, sex, sexy, technology, the future

June 14, 2017 · 7:00 am

Boredom: The Epidemic Of The Future?

Back in August of 2013, a very heinous, very unusual crime made headlines around the world. In Dunkan, Oklahoma, a group of three teenagers allegedly murdered Christopher Lane, an Australian exchange student just out for a jog, in cold blood just because they were bored.

Think about that for a moment. A bunch of teenagers got so bored and were so desperate form stimulation that they resorted to cold-blooded murder just to get their adrenaline flowing. We, as a society, are so used to crimes of passion and desperation. They’re basically the premise of every episode of “CSI” and “Law and Order.”

The fact those shows keep getting renewed show that we have a certain concept of what inspires and propagates crime and deviance. People who commit these crimes usually have some sort of overpowering motivation that overshadows any sense of decency they have. They’re desperate for money, they’re hopelessly in love, or in some cases, they’re pathological psychopaths with fatal flaws in their biology.

What makes the murder of Christopher Lane so horrifying is that it completely upends that narrative. The killers, in this case, weren’t motivated by revenge, money, or personality disorders. They were just bored.

That is extremely disconcerting because we’ve all felt bored at some point in our lives. There was this one time the power got knocked out at my house for nearly two days and I couldn’t do damn near anything. When it got dark and I had no more light with which to read comics, it got to be damn near agonizing. I never did anything stupid because of it, but this crime should give everyone pause.

The fact that we’re all capable of being exceedingly bored reveals a disturbing possibility. If three bored teenagers are capable of such a heinous act, then are others just as capable? Are we, personally, capable of such horror? Depending on how bored you’ve been in the past, that’s a disturbing question to even think about.

However, it may become an increasingly relevant question in the future. Usually, when I talk about the future on this blog, I explore the more positive ramifications of our advances in technology. I talk about how this technology will cure infectious disease, enhance our cognitive abilities beyond our caveman limits, and improve our sex lives to amazingly kinky heights.

I know, at times, it sound downright utopian in my vision of the future. By our current standards, wherein we live in a world where 3.7 million children die before their fifth birthday, it certainly seems rosy by comparison. However, I stick my fingers in my ears and start singing John Lennon songs when I contemplate potential problems in that vision. This is one issue that’s easy to overlook, but has major implications.

At this moment in history, society has a great many distractions in terms of entertainment and productivity. Most people have jobs, of some sort, to keep them busy. The three teenagers who killed Christopher Lee were on summer vacation and had nothing productive to do. It’s hard to know whether a part-time job at a fast food joint would’ve averted a murder, but they would’ve had to find a different excuse.

Whether you’re toiling in the fields of a small farm or running around an office like an episode of “The Office,” we’ve always had some kind of work to keep us, as a species, occupied. For most of human history, we had to work. If we didn’t, then we starved to death. It was that simple.

It’s another rare instance where caveman logic seems to apply equally across time and history. It doesn’t matter whether we’re hunter/gatherers or sweatshop workers putting together barbie dolls. We’re a species that’s wired to work. It may not always be the work we prefer, but we know why it’s necessary on some levels. We need to gather and manage our resources to survive.

That, however, is where the chink in our boredom-busting armor might start. For most of human history, we’ve always had to work ourselves to the bone to keep our species and our civilization moving. That’s rapidly changing due to trends in automation. Add in the growth of artificial intelligence, the rise of 3D printing, and the possibility of lab-grown food, and suddenly we don’t need millions of people toiling anymore.

Now by most measures, it’s a good thing that we don’t need people to endure back-breaking labor just to get the bare minimum of sustenance. Most people would rather not work in fields of cow shit or work 12-hour shifts in a factory. They’d rather work a reasonable number of hours that provides them abundant leisure and family time. That’s wholly possible in a modern economy.

However, at some point, technology will make even that reasonable set of hours won’t be necessary. Our ability to make our food, purify our water, and generate power might become so efficient that the amount of work needed is minimal. Given our tendency to screw up on the job, it may get to a point where having human workers is a liability.

It could lead to a huge mass of unemployment or under-employment. However, that wouldn’t mean everyone would have to live in poverty. On the contrary, it may eliminate poverty altogether because we could allocate the basic necessities of life so efficiently. Policies like the universal basic income, which I’ve talked about before, may effectively decouple the link between work and survival.

This is all well and good for people who hate doing menial jobs for low pay, but it creates a situation that we, as a species, have never dealt with before. What happens to our bodies, minds, and biology when we don’t have to work at all and are subject to the constant threat of boredom?

That’s not entirely a rhetorical question. It’s also one of those questions that’s impossible to answer now, but might be possible to address in the future. We’ve never had a functioning society where nobody has to work and everybody has access to the basics of life, free of charge. It’s so unprecedented that it’s hard to know whether we’re even wired for it.

The ghastly murder of Christopher Lane implies that our minds and bodies don’t react well to boredom. It makes us think crazy thoughts, do crazy things, and act on crazy impulses. What else other than boredom can explain people dedicating so much time and energy into making paperclip chains?

It doesn’t just reflect to our basic caveman settings. These are essential survival instincts that every species that has ever lived have built into their biology. Every creature, be it a lion or a dung beetle, dedicates a significant amount of its existence simply securing food, avoiding predators, and finding a mate. Given the never-ending competition of nature and evolution, there’s literally no time to be bored.

Humans are in an unprecedented situation compared to other species. We’re basically like players in a massive multi-player video game armed with cheat codes. We are so dominate, so powerful, and so adaptable that no other species has a prayer. Sure, a deer may kill an unlucky human every now and then, but deer are just not able to dominate the way humans dominate.

The problem is that this undermines the very mechanics of evolution and survival instinct. What happens to a species where it doesn’t need those instincts to survive and reproduce anymore? With our tools and technology, humans can kill any predator and beat any disease.

That means our only concern would be reproduction. That might already be playing out to some extent. There have been some links, albeit weak ones, between adolescent boredom and teen pregnancy. When you think about it from a survival standpoint, it makes sense. If there’s no food to gather or predators to avoid, your next instinct is to mate. At the very least, having kids gives you something to do.

However, technology may make that unnecessary as well. Between advances in contraception and artificial wombs, even that most basic instinct won’t be necessary for the propagation of our species. In that scenario, sex would have no reproductive purposes. It would just be another thing we do with our bodies when we’re bored. While that might mean more people get laid, it also means risking even more boredom.

Can we, as a species and as individuals, function with that kind of boredom? In a future where we have so few concerns to our survival, safety, and propagation, can we actually tolerate life? Again, it’s not entirely a rhetorical question.

Just imagine yourself in that situation. You wake up in a nice, comfortable dwelling every day. You don’t have to work. Anything you want to eat is readily available. If you want to have sex, there are apps to connect you with people or sex robots that make that as easy as ordering a pizza. You have all the time you want for hobbies, sports, and what not.

It might be fun at first, but what happens when you get bored? How do you fill every hour of every day? What happens when you’ve read all your books, beat every video game, and collected every stamp? What will you do to entertain yourself?

That’s not to say some people will resort to the lengths that those teenagers in Oklahoma went to when they murdered an innocent man. However, the fact that this happened today when we’re still a long way from that rosy future is telling. It might even be a warning that we’re not prepared for the boredom pandemic to come.

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Filed under Jack Fisher's Insights, Sexy Future

Tagged as Artificial Intelligence, boredom, boring, Caveman Logic, civilization, crime, entertainment, futurism, human flaws, human psychology, human society, psychology, social justice, society, the future, video games

June 13, 2017 · 7:02 am

Khan Academy: The (Near) Future Of Education?

Image result for Khan Academy

In talking about education, I’ve highlighted issues that give me fever dreams about my experience in high school and those that give me hope for future students. While I know it’s not a very sexy topic, it does matter a great deal. A society full of idiots is only good for creating embarrassing YouTube videos and Chuck Lorre sitcoms, but not much else.

Our current method for education people in the western world has a lot of room for improvement. Some, like South Korea and Japan, do it better than others. Others, like the state of Texas, are easy punchlines in jokes about stupidity and I’m not just talking about their laughable record on sexual education.

Let’s not lie to ourselves. Education is hard. Every human being is wired different. Kids are especially tricky. Between puberty and sugar, it’s hard to help them learn, especially if they don’t want to learn. Our brains weren’t wired for assembly line style education that requires memorization, lectures, and standardized tests. They were wired for survival, reproduction, and avoiding hungry bears.

At some point in the future, we may be able to tweak that old wiring to make education easier. Companies like Neuralink are already working on that. However, that kind of brain building is years off. While it is promising, there are many who may lament that they or their children won’t get to benefit from this kind of innovation. They’re stuck using textbooks and number two pencils.

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Well, for once, I’m not going to fantasize about an advancement that’s way off in the future, like smart blood or sex robots. There are some amazing advancements in this field and they don’t require a brain implant. They don’t even require a private tutor from South Korea. Big changes to education aren’t just some far-off future fantasy. They’re actually happening.

That brings me to Khan Academy. I’ve mentioned them before, albeit not in great detail. I kind of feel bad about that because it’s doing some amazing work in the field of education. It is, very much, a game-changer to the way we think about education. It has the potential to educate people all over the world at a cost that’s almost negligible.

Image result for standardized test

What is Khan Academy, though? Well, that’s not an unreasonable question because it’s one of those things that is known in some crowds, but not others. It’s also fairly new. Khan Academy started only ten years ago and it started by accident, which happens a lot more than you think.

The story of how it came to be is actually pretty remarkable. The man who created, Salman Khan, didn’t intend to make it into one of the biggest innovations to hit education since the invention of pocket calculators. It just played out that way. Several years ago, 60 Minutes did a story about it and it reveals some pretty amazing insights.

However it came to be, Khan Academy’s mission is as bold as it is important. It seeks, in their own words, “to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere.” At a time when the cost of education is rising frustratingly fast, Khan Academy dares to be bolder.

It doesn’t require big, fancy schools. It doesn’t require an army of trained teachers, some of which may or may not be qualified for their job. It doesn’t even require students to leave the house. It only requires someone with a computer, an internet connection, and an ability to access a website. These days, those are skills that most kids learn to do right out of the womb.

That’s not to say it’s better in every way. There are some things that you can’t just learn by doing exercises online. You wouldn’t want a mechanic, plumber, or gynecologist only learning their trade through online videos. You’d want them to have some kind of training.

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Even so, the value of having a cheap, effective way of educating young children cannot be understated. Beyond simply knowing how much to tip at a restaurant, education helps children think and reason for themselves. It helps them make sense of a world where the Kardashians are celebrities and Johnny Depp still makes movies.

We, as a species, need societies of kids and adults who can think. Until we perfect neural implants, education is still going to be a challenge. That’s why innovations like Khan Academy are so valuable.

The Future Of Education (And The Demise Of Idiots)

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In his seminal book, “Outliers: The Story Of Success,” Malcolm Gladwell explored the factors behind some of the world’s most successful individuals. In that exploration, he stated that it took approximately 10,000 hours of correct, focused practice to master a skill. It’s an often-repeated rule espoused by athletes, artists, and YouTube stars.

It’s also somewhat debatable. If that figure really were accurate, then I should’ve mastered writing three years ago. I don’t think I have. I still find new ways to improve with every book and every blog post. I get the message of Gladwell’s rule. To get really good at anything, you do need to practice and practice well.

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Then, we see movies like “The Matrix,” where Neo mastered every martial art ever created in the span of a day. Even though it was a work of fiction, it presented a scenario where practicing a skill was for suckers. Neo didn’t have to practice anything. He just sat in a chair, plugged a gizmo into the back of his neck, and just like that he knew Kung Fu.

That scenario may have been pretty extreme at the time. Keep in mind, though, that the Matrix came out in 1999. Back then, a flip phone was still considered cutting-edge technology. A lot has happened since then and I’m not just talking about our ability to watch porn on the bus.

Image result for Cell phones in 1999

The ability to upload knowledge directly into our brains, effectively learning a skill in an instant, is one of the most underrated technologies in science fiction. It’s never more than an afterthought or plot convenience at most. In terms of its utility and impact on human society, though, it’s right up there with flying cars and sex robots.

I’ve talked about the ongoing deficiencies of our education system and the human brain’s limitations when it comes to learning critical thinking skills. Now, I’d like to stop spitting on my own species and give everyone some reason for hope. I do believe that our species will one day make idiots, as we know them, a relic of the past, much like circumcision and the orgasm gap.

That’s because our species, despite its many limitations, is really good at one particular skill. That’s the ability to build tools. As we speak, the fine folks at DARPA, also known as the United State’s Military’s “mad science” division, is working on a form of accelerated learning that would make Neo proud, albeit unimpressed.

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It’s not the same as uploading a skill the same way we upload files to our phones. They call it Targeted Neuroplasticity Training, which is a fancy way of saying it seeks to directly stimulate the human nervous system to facilitate the learning of an advanced skill.

From a pragmatic standpoint, it makes sense for DARPA and the military to want something like this. A lot of time and money goes into training soldiers, pilots, officers, and operatives into mastering a specialized skill, be it flying a plane or interrogating a suspected terrorist. Not every military recruit has the skill or sex appeal of James Bond. Most have to work at it.

This new form of training will cut down on the amount of time soldiers and recruits need to learn various skills. Like many other advances that got their start in the military, it may only be a matter of time before this sort of technology finds its way into classrooms.

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There’s already a potential business opportunity, thanks to Elon Musk’s new company, Neuralink. I’ve already talked about the potential of how brain interfaces will make us smarter and sexier. The current research with DARPA will provide a viable method for using that interface to improve learning.

Once this technology matures, and there are plenty of financial and pragmatic incentives behind it, then we’ll have to completely rethink how we educate ourselves and our kids. Old methods like catchy nursery rhymes or standardized tests, which have a limited effectiveness at best, would instantly be obsolete.

The school of the future may not involve big, bulky buildings full of lockers, overpriced textbooks, and wedgies. It may just be a simple office building where an individual, be it a kid or an adult, sits down and links their brain implant to a computer. Then, through a mix of direct neural stimulation and machine interface, we learn the kinds of skills that used to take decades to master.

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That means every kid, from the age of five, can learn the kind of critical thinking skills usually reserved for college grad students and NPR talk shows. It also means learning technical skills like how to operate a computer, fix a car, build a birdhouse, or paint like Bob Ross are as easy as downloading an app to our phones.

Make no mistake. There are people working on the technology to download knowledge directly into the human brain. The incentives are just too strong and I’m not just talking about the military. Between big business and professional sports teams looking for an edge, the idea of just downloading a skill into a person has too many potential uses.

The impact this will have on society cannot be understated. It’s an impact that few, especially an aspiring erotica/romance writer, are equipped to imagine. Education is one of the few policies cited as a major tool against poverty. Also, a society of fewer idiots is a healthier society by nearly every measure.

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While education is, on orders of magnitude, much better today than it was 100 years ago, there’s still plenty of room for improvement. There are just so many practical and logistic issues that come with educating over seven billion people from different backgrounds, cultures, languages, and what not.

The ability to download knowledge and stimulate the brain directly could be the key to finally closing what remains of the education gap. That gap is still pretty wide and a huge factor in many unresolved issues, from job opportunities to sexual education. There are huge swaths of the population that still don’t know how condoms work.

As this technology improves, the barriers that keep entire swaths of people from knowing and understanding the world critically will crumble. That has major implications for the multi-trillion dollar education market, as well political parties that rely too much on idiots voting.

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It also has major implication for our love lives, our sex lives, and everything in between. Whenever I’ve talked about human enhancement, I’ve pointed out how smart people tend to make better decisions in both their love lives and their sex lives. In matters of intimacy, it makes sense to know how your partner’s genitals work. That’s just common sense.

The extent to which accelerated learning would affect our personal and professional lives is still hard to quantify. As society becomes more and more educated, we’ve had to rethink and re-imagine what it means to be in love or make love with someone.

Like Morpheus pointed out in “The Matrix,” though, our system of education is still governed by a set of rules and limitations. Our brains and bodies are still stuck on the same settings they were during our caveman days. We’re only beginning to unlock and rewire those settings.

Image result for neo from the matrix

That means there may indeed come a day where won’t just be able to circumvent the 10,000 hours of practice that Gladwell espoused. We won’t even need practice in the first place. When that day comes, we’ll all be Neo.

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Tagged as accelerated learning, education, future, future of love, futurism, human enhancement, human stupidity, learning, love, Neuralink, neurobiology, sex in society, sexual education, society, stupidity

May 26, 2017 · 6:57 am

Will Sex Robots Make Us Better People?

I’m going to do it again. That’s right. I’m going to talk about sex robots. Do I have your attention now? I know it’s not the first time I’ve brought up this inherently kinky, but sexy topic. I doubt it’ll be the last. Honestly, there’s so much potential in this topic, sexy and otherwise, that I’m surprised I don’t talk about it more often.

There’s no way around it. Sex robots are coming, literally and figuratively. There’s already a brothel in Spain that employs sex dolls for customers. Companies like RealDoll are actively working on developing them. Given that sex still sells and there’s a lot of horny people in the world, the economic and personal incentives are just too huge.

Like any early technology, though, it’s going through some growing paints. It’s still a ways away from being refined, effective, and cheap. Like early cell phones and TVs, sex robots are going through that clunky phase where they seem more like a novelty than a practical reality.

Eventually, we’ll work out the kinks, so to speak. I’m confident that everyone under the age of 30 will live to see a day where sex robots are almost indistinguishable from real partners. They won’t just look, feel, and sound real. They’ll be every bit as customizable and versatile as modern smartphones.

You want a meek, submissive partner who only lives to serve you? There will be a sex robot for that. You want a tough, dominant bondage enthusiast who makes you their personal bitch? There will be a sex robot for that too. The only limit is your own perverse imagination.

This leads to one vital question, which I’m sure hasn’t slipped the minds of those who still make weird faces when the topic of sex robots comes up. I imagine these same people used to think Twitter was a waste as well. Today, I imagine they’re still kicking themselves for not buying stock in it. It’s still a wholly relevant question, though.

How will sex robots affect society?

I’ve been dancing around this question for a while because I’m still not sure how to address it. Believe me, though, I’m working on it. I do want to keep talking about sex robots. I’ve noticed it gets my target audience uniquely excited.

However, there are others who think about this topic as well, sometimes more intently than even an aspiring erotica/romance writer would dare. The cast from ThinkTank, a fun and sometimes kinky YouTube channel that I’ve cited before, actually chose to ask that question in a different way.

How will sex robots make us better people?

On the surface, that does seem like a loaded question, if that’s not too inappropriate a term. It seems inherently bias that sex robots will only make people better. That’s like pretending ski masks are only used for skiing or that guns are only used for hunting.

Loaded or not, they do highlight an important dynamic of sex robots. It’s one that tends to get overlooked and underplayed, but one that has the potential to change society in a way that’s very positive by most measures. It has less to do with how we interact with sex robots and more to do with how they’ll interact with us.

Here’s the video that explores this discussion. I’ll give those who own fleshlights and vibrators a minute to collect their thoughts and steady their hearts. Take all the time you need.

At the core of the issue here is how the artificial intelligence within these sex robots is configured. There will be some that just obey orders. Like any appliance or gadget, you push a button and you get the effect you want. There will be a market for those sex robots, just as there’s still a market for old flip phones.

However, that’s not going to be enough for some people. I know this because those with vibrators and fleshlights still seek love and companionship. That’s because, in addition to being extremely horny, we’re a very emotional species as well. We are biologically wired to seek intimate connections with others. Incorporating that function into a sex robot just seems logical.

A sex robot with that kind of ability would do more than just provide the experience of sharing an intimate connection with a user. It’ll help people explore and develop their ability to seek such connections with others. It could be a teacher or a mentor of sorts. This is just one you have sex with and looks as sexy as you want it to be. There’s literally nothing unappealing about that concept.

Beyond the teenage fantasy, though, there’s another aspect to that idea that ThinkTank didn’t touch on. It has to do with our collective struggles to explore and deal with sexual issues. Given the erratic nature of our sexual attitudes, it’s an issue that’s bound to come up.

Think back to the heath classes or sex ed you got in high school, assuming you didn’t go to school in Texas. Those classes told you what sex was, how it worked, and the body parts involved. Some may have even touched on the dynamics of sexual relationships. Again, if you got your education in a state like Texas, your experience may vary.

Just knowing about sex isn’t enough, though. Most of those students are still horny teenagers who don’t know how to deal with their horniness just yet. They don’t have many outlets to explore that feeling. Other than internet porn and each other, their options are limited.

Now, imagine getting that same information from health and sex ed. Then, imagine getting your own sex robot to help you explore your sexuality. Whether you’re a man or woman, gay or straight, you have something that will actually guide you through the intricacies of having sex and forging relationships.

It may sound like a bad scene from a porno, but throw an intelligent sex robot into the mix and suddenly, it’s not just pornographic. It’s wholly pragmatic.

As the clip said, sex robots with AI could be programmed to help teach users to interact and understand one another. It could teach men and women to better form genuine, intimate connections. Compared to the lessons that movies, video games, and fairy tales teach, which makes it seem like everyone needs to be a prince or princess, sex robots would be invaluable towards molding healthy minds and genitals.

So much of our struggles to get along, be they unequal gender dynamics or a poor understanding of what constitutes consent, stem from our limited ability to form relationships. They also may be a product of not getting laid often enough.

I know I’ve said this before, but it’s worth saying again. There are a lot of health benefits to regular sex. When someone has a rich, satisfying sex life, they’re generally happier and nicer to be around. A society full of sexually satisfied men and women who actually know how to forge intimate relationships can only be a good one.

It’s still impossible to know just how sex robots will affect society. There may very well be other negative consequences that I either haven’t explored or thought of yet. Whatever they may be, expect me to talk about them or write about them in my novels at some point. It’s just too sexy a topic to ignore. In time, nobody will be able to ignore it.

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Tagged as feminism, future of love, future society, gender, gender equality, gender issues, human sexuality, human society, love, sex, sex bots, sex dolls, sex in society, sex robots, sexuality, technology, ThinkTank

May 19, 2017 · 6:52 am

A Second Sexual Revolution: The Potential (And Inevitable) Backlash

Think back to brief, but memorable time between elementary and middle school where kids are still kids for the most part. It’s the time before you develop concerns about things like acne and hiding awkward boners during gym class. It’s a time before the girls start wearing thongs or hiding bra straps. For some, those times have fond memories.

Often, during these times, you’ll encounter one of those annoying little shits who likes to think of him or herself as the class clown. You know how they operate. They’re loud, annoying, obnoxious, arrogant, and will set their own hair on fire if it gets attention. They might have been funny the first few times, but it doesn’t take long for them to be a walking source of frustration.

Teachers, parents, and counselors do anything and everything they can to get the kid to shut up, but nothing works. Every time they push him, he just pushes back harder. Every time they react to his antics, he reacts even more. Since he’s a kid, he can sort of get away with it.

What I just described is a testament to how kids can be annoying little shits and what happens when our efforts to fix a situation ends up causing a backlash. It’s one of those things that happens almost as much in real life as it does in bad sitcoms. For every time Peter Griffin’s antics in “Family Guy” backfires horribly, there’s a real-life class clown in a public school ensuring everything around him backfires just as badly.

We don’t just see it in elementary school classrooms and Seth MacFarlane shows either. Throughout history, backlashes have shaped the course of events, from the ancient world to modern presidents who think randomly invading a Middle Eastern country won’t cause any geopolitical problems.

It’s not unreasonable to say that many events and cultural movements are very much a backlash at those that preceded it. It’s how dynasties rise and fall. It’s how religious and cultural movements morph into cults and denominations. It’s even how some successful TV shows inspire spin-offs. Not all of these backlashes result in improvements, but they are very much a part of how people, cultures, and nations evolve.

This brings me back to the prospect of a second sexual revolution. Admit it, you knew I was going to get to this. It was only a matter of time before I tied the concept of a backlash into something sexy. I would’ve gotten to it sooner, but I wanted to establish a context. It’s necessary because in every cultural upheaval, it’s easy to lose perspective.

The problem is that we don’t know just how much perspective we’ve lost until we have the benefit of hindsight. It’s like getting blackout drunk and waking up in another city with a donkey, a dildo, and a dead gerbil in your bed. You remember starting the night with good intentions and having a great time. Somewhere along the way, though, something went horribly wrong.

When we look at the context of the sexual revolution in the 60s, we can see how backlash shaped its promising beginnings and how it got blackout drunk towards the end. I’ve mentioned how technology like antibiotics and contraception reshaped sexuality by effectively removing some of the consequences and barriers to sexual expression. There are other, less tangible factors in play as well.

We know from 50s sitcoms that the period before the sexual revolution was a tough time to be really horny. The 1950s was a time of rigid sexual conformity. Anything outside of marriage, procreation, and the missionary position was considered a deviant social ill. Things like masturbation, the female orgasm, and Elvis’ hips were all taboo.

This kind of sexual restraint went so far that an emerging generation of horny youth decided to spit all over that prudish culture. Armed with modern antibiotics, contraception, and mind-altering drugs that made orgasms easier to enjoy, they really went for broke. They didn’t just push the envelope. They bombed it with napalm and buried it in horse shit.

Ironically, they went so far that they incurred a backlash just as strong as the one they led. That led to the rise of people like Jerry Fawell, Pat Robertson, and the Moral Majority, people and organizations who went full fire and brimstone after seeing one too many mud-soaked hippie orgies. Add this on top of the emergence of issues like abortion and diseases like AIDS and it’s easy to see why everyone’s panties got a little tighter.

In both cases, one backlash incurred another. One extreme led to another. Even today, we may be seeing another backlash from a general loosening of sexual freedom again, but it’s just taking the form of political correctness and reactionary outrage over issues as trivial as a swimsuit ad.

These days, you won’t be shunned if you have premarital sex or watch porn in your spare time. However, you’re in big trouble if you don’t understand the increasingly esoteric concept of consent, directly or indirectly body shame women, or want to draw a female character wearing sexy clothes.

Every trend, especially the sexy kinds, seem unstoppable at first. That’s why it’s become popular to urge others to be “on the right side of history.” That’s an exceedingly vague excuse, as is often the case with excuses in general, but it lays the foundation for a future backlash.

I’d say any second sexual revolution should take that into account, but I know that would just be empty rhetoric. Backlash is something that no revolution, movement, or reformation can truly take into account. Being flawed humans with flawed brains, we tend to overestimate the staying power of any trend. Just ask anyone who was ever part of a boy band not named Justin Timberlake.

A second sexual revolution, like the one that occurred in the 60s, will likely shock, horrify, and excite. Those are the key ingredients of every revolution or movement. They’re so different. They get peoples’ attention because it doesn’t fit with their idea of normal and, much like our annual failure to keep our New Years Resolution, people cling desperately to their sense of normal and resist change at every turn.

A second sexual revolution may involve anything from group marriages to sex robots to gender-bending orgies in public parks. It’s impossible to predict where our collective libidos will take us. It is possible, if not inevitable, that there will be some kind of backlash along the way. When change happens that fast, people get really stressed out and people do crazy things when they’re stressed.

There are all sorts of ways that a second sexual revolution can manifest. I don’t want to make too many predictions. I’d rather save those sexy contemplations for one of my future novels. I will, however, throw in one last complications that may make the next revolution unique from every other revolution in human history.

No matter how extreme or kinky a revolution was in the past, including Victorian England, there was one common theme. They were all driven by the crude and horny whims of our caveman brains, whose wiring hasn’t been upgraded in over 100,000 years. It’s like constantly changing the rules of the game, but never changing the equipment.

Advances in biotechnology and brain enhancement, such as that being planned by Neuralink, may completely change the dynamics of human thought and society. The same forces that incurred backlashes in the past might not be a factor anymore. People may very well be an entirely new way of dealing with a new sexual revolution.

Again, it’s impossible to predict. As soon as we start tweaking our brains and upgrading our biology, all bets are off. History and hindsight are no longer accurate guides with which to understand the course of society. The potential of another sexual revolution is vast, but the potential for backlash is every bit as big.

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Tagged as biotechnology, counterculture, emerging technology, family, human sexuality, love, marriage, romance, sex, sexual freedom, sexual health, sexual repression, sexuality, sexy, technology, the human body

May 18, 2017 · 6:53 am

A Second Sexual Revolution: The (Sexy And Non-Sexy) Possibilities

Every revolution in history thought theirs was to be the last. They thought when all was said and done, the radical change they brought to society would be vindicated, ever-lasting, and celebrated. Through the harsh lens of history, those behind those revolution all have one thing in common. They all thought wrong.

Whether you’re fighting for the right to marry a squirrel or marching with Vladimir Lenin himself, those behind a revolution are often blinded by their ideals. They see the change they’re seeking as a new and proven method for fixing society’s many ills. Seeing as how every society in every point in history has had many ills, they’ve had a lot to work with.

That was the case with the sexual revolution of the 1960s. However, I explained in another post how this so-called revolution followed the basic formula of many other revolutions. Those revolutions are now pages in history whose effects have been either tempered, rebuked, forgotten, or overlooked.

It’s impossible to predict when, where, and how a revolution will unfold. The why, though, is almost always the same. There’s something insufficient about the current state of affairs. Whether it’s the government, the economy, or trends in movies, there’s always some sort of deficiency. With sex, the rules are unique, the stakes are higher, and the impact spans everything from how we do it to what we wear to get it.

At some point, there will be another “sexual revolution” of sorts. It probably won’t be called that. You won’t turn on the news one day and hear that another sexual revolution has begun so everyone should stock up on stilettos and lube. As time passes, though, and we can look back with painfully clear hindsight, we’ll see just how revolutionary it was.

It’s not a guarantee. Nothing is when you speculate about the future. However, current trends in technology are taking us down a similar path to the sexual revolution we saw play out in the 1960s. As those trends achieve certain milestones, our sex lives will be impacted. After that, all bets are off.

I’ve already talked about a few of these trends and their very sexy possibilities. The field of human enhancement, particularly with advances like smart blood, could give us superhuman endurance, beauty, and sex skills. A world where men and women can hump like porn stars on crack is definitely revolutionary.

That advance is a ways off, though. Others like new forms of long-lasting contraception and new disease-fighting agents like CRISPR would bring their own brand of change. Some are even already here. There are two men living this planet who have a bionic penis. If you think that’s not going to cause some revolutionary ideas, then you’re underestimating how much inspiration men draw from their penis.

All these amazing advances are emerging at a time when we, as a society, seem to be getting more sexually uptight. We already saw how technology, specifically the advent of antibiotics and modern contraception, helped spur the sexual revolution of the 60s. So what kind of revolution will these advances inspire?

Again, it’s impossible to predict. I’m an aspiring erotica/romance writer. I’m as qualified to be an oracle of the future as I am an astronaut brain surgeon. That said, since I write so much about sex on this blog and in my novels, I like to think I have some insight.

If a second revolution does start, it’ll do so when technology like CRISPR develops to the point where every nasty infectious disease that kept our collective panties on gets cured. That will eventually happen. The first sexual revolution in the 60s saw the end to some of the nastiest diseases we ever endured as a species. It just came too late for men like Al Capone.

As soon as we enter a world where there’s no debilitating disease like syphilis or AIDS to terrify us between the sheets, that will change the game. At the moment, we dedicate significant resources to teaching horny teenagers about the dangerous diseases they can get if they have more sex than what religious authorities and registered republicans deem appropriate.

So what happens when those diseases are cured? Well, it’s going to certainly terrify parents who don’t want to think about their precious babies getting sweaty, naked, and loud as they indulge in the kinds of decadent orgies usually reserved for Roman emperors. Some will rally against it. Some may even try to prevent these diseases from being cured. That didn’t work in the 60s, though. I doubt it’ll work in the 21st century.

Without disease, the only real consequence people will have about sex is unplanned pregnancy. However, that too might become an afterthought thanks to advances like Vasalgel, which will likely enter the market within the next five years or so. Add this on top of improvements to IUDs, as well as advances in artificial wombs, and then pregnancy becomes a non-issue.

That’s not to say that sex won’t have risks. Even without the potential anxiety of disease and unplanned pregnancy, there will still be issues between the sheets. If there isn’t, we’ll create them. That’s what we humans tend to do with our caveman brain. Then again, with the emergence of brain enhancements, such as Neuralink, that too might be mitigated.

This is all assuming there won’t be other major trends in technology or society that nobody, especially not an aspiring erotica/romance writer, is able to anticipate. There’s a virtual 100 percent chance guarantee that such an assumption is wrong. Even if we can’t make that assumption, we can still entertain some sexy speculation.

That’s where the prospect of a second sexual revolution gets interesting/scary. It’ll arouse some while making others put on an extra pair of panties. That’s also where being an erotica/romance writer gives me an edge because it gives me a chance to blur the line between fantasy and reality.

Perhaps the second sexual revolution will involve a new concept of what it means to be monogamous with someone. That concept may actually not involve sex, weddings, or legally binding documents either.

Perhaps the second sexual revolution will emphasize intimacy more than basic pleasure. With no concerns about pregnancy or disease, along with enhancements to the body and brain, we can focus entirely on being intimate with our partner.

Perhaps the second sexual revolution will expand and enhance the pleasure we experience. Between brain enhancements and biotechnology, the orgasms we feel today may be a mild tingle compared to what we experience in the future.

Perhaps the second sexual revolution won’t just emphasize pleasure between two people. We may end up forming intimate groups, linked together by a shared love and possibly shared thoughts.

Perhaps the second sexual revolution will actually temper our sex drives so that we can better channel it. We may emphasize control over expression, preferring quality over quantity with the aid of brain enhancements and biotechnology.

There are all possibilities. There’s very little chance that only one manifests. There’s a better chance that we’ll see bits and pieces of these ideas converge to create something that we simply can’t imagine right now with our caveman brains. It’s an inherently sexy idea with many implications, both sexual and otherwise.

So what do you think a second sexual revolution will bring? What can we expect in a world where technology and medicine expand our ability and understanding of sex and intimacy? I don’t usually get a lot of comments on this blog, but I’m very interested in hearing new ideas on this topic.

So please take the time to share your thoughts on this issue. I think it’s definitely worth discussing, if only to give me more excuses to talk about sex robots.

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Filed under Sexy Future

Tagged as counterculture, future of love, futurism, human enhancement, love, relationships, romance, sex, sexual health, sexual repression, Sexual Revolution, sexy, the human body, transhumanism

May 12, 2017 · 7:03 am

A Disease-Free World: We’re More Ready Than You Think

It’s such a frightening thought. It terrifies parents, priests, rabbis, mullahs, monks, and conservative republicans. People, especially young people, are having sex at this very moment. If that’s not horrifying enough, they’re having sex for fun.

They’re not doing it with their government-approved, religiously-sanctioned spouse. They’re not doing it to produce more babies that will grow into tax-paying, church-going citizens. They’re just doing it because they enjoy the wonderful, toe-curling pleasure that comes with sex.

The most horrifying thought of all, though, is that they’re doing it and they’re not facing any consequences for it. They’re not getting pregnant because of modern contraception. They’re not getting sick either because of modern medicine. There’s literally no legitimate reason other than stigma to dissuade people from having sex for fun. It’s such a horrifying thought.

Okay, that’s enough sarcasm for now. What I just described is an exaggerated extreme of the mentality of those who are opposed to a society that permits or does not punish sexual promiscuity. It’s a reverse of the thought experiment I pitched last year about a world where the diseases that used to scare people out of having sex are all cured.

I don’t think people realize just how much closer we are to that world than they think. Most people alive today don’t remember a world where the biggest dread wasn’t HIV. It was debilitating diseases like syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia. To give you an idea of just how devastating they were, over 20,000 people died from syphilis alone in 1939.

Like small pox, these diseases ravaged generation after generation. Also like small pox, modern medicine eradicated it from our collective fears. In fact, the rise of antibiotics has been largely credited with kick-starting the sexual revolution of the 1960s, more so than contraception.

There are still some scary diseases out there, though. In some respects, those same parents, priests, rabbis, mullahs, monks, and conservative republicans can take a perverse comfort that diseases like HIV/AIDS provides a strong incentive to avoid excessive promiscuity. That comfort, however, won’t last.

In a previous post, I talked about an emerging medical tool called CRISPR and how it may hold the key to ending infectious disease as we know it. I also asked a question I’m sure the anti-promiscuity crowd dreads. Are we ready for a world where we don’t have to worry about sexually transmitted diseases?

There are people who believe that our society simply cannot function in a world where there aren’t any scary diseases to dissuade people from having more sex than the Catholic Church sanctions. On paper, their fears aren’t wholly unreasonable.

In a society with so much promiscuity, fewer people will get married. Fewer people will form the stable, nuclear family that every 50s sitcom championed. Without disease, why would anyone forge any stable family units? Then, there’s the children. How traumatic would it be for them if they grew up in a world where people just had sex for fun?

That’s not entirely sarcasm. That is a very real concern and I can empathize with it to some extent. A society without disease, but full of rampant promiscuity is just so different. Our society has always had to content with these horrible diseases. The idea that they would no longer be a factor just seems unnatural and uncharted for our species.

However, empathy or not, it’s also a sentiment that I believe is misguided. It’s rooted more in flawed assumptions about a specific cultural ideal than actual human biology. I would argue that human beings, as well as society in general, is more prepared for a disease-free world than the Vatican would have us believe.

I believe this because there is a precedent, sort of. In fact, this may be one of the few instances where caveman logic works in favor of our emerging future and not against it. To understand this, we have to go beyond the ways our hunter/gatherer ancestors functioned. We have to look at the practical aspects of these nasty diseases.

For a disease to be real nasty, it has to both spread easily and within a population of hosts that are able to infect as many potential hosts as possible. When you look at our modern infrastructure, or even our ancient trade routes, it’s easy to see why a nasty disease would choose humans.

It’s also easy to see why diseases would use sex to spread. Like eating, it’s a hardwired drive that built into every human being. The desire to mate is every bit as powerful as the desire to eat. Unlike foodborne disease, though, sex provides more opportunities to infect other hosts. On top of that, rubbing body parts together is a lot more direct than simply sneezing on someone.

However, while modern and even pre-modern infrastructure made sex an ideal mechanism for spreading disease, we have to remember that this situation is actually very recent. The ability to simply travel to other regions, meet other people, and possibly have sex with them is very new in the context of our evolutionary history. For most of that history, though, the story was very different.

That brings me back to the hunter/gatherer lifestyle from which all our ancestors evolved. Books like “Sex At Dawn,” which I’ve mentioned before, describe in great detail the particulars of this lifestyle. It’s a lifestyle that, ironically to some extent, makes sex a pretty lousy method for transmitting disease.

This is because during those hunter/gatherer days, we humans roamed and foraged in small bands of closely-knit tribes. These tribes rarely interacted with other tribes because most were spaced out over large areas. Naturally, roaming lands and foraging for food makes it hard to stay in one place, stake claim to a territory, and fight over it.

On top of that, these close-knit tribes had very low population density, a limited ability to travel long distances, and no elaborate trade networks. That means that within these tribes, a sexually transmitted disease is rightly screwed. Sure, it can infect a tribe, but not much else. If that disease is fatal, it may kill the tribe, but it also kills itself as well. So if a disease as nasty as AIDS did emerge, it never had a chance to spread.

If there were any diseases, they couldn’t be fatal and they couldn’t seriously affect fertility. Like the common cold or the flu, it could only ever be so nasty. Otherwise, it never would’ve survived into the modern era.

Keep in mind, also, that the hunter/gatherer lifestyle was the lifestyle of choice for our species for nearly 90 percent of its existence. Our evolution and biology emerged within this lifestyle. That lifestyle was also conducive to some fairly loose sexual practices, many of which would make the Rick Santorums of the world faint. That’s why it’s not unreasonable to say that our ancestors had better sex lives than we do.

Those sexual practices were rarely conducive to the world of white picket fence type families that is so idealized by western civilization. It’s also not conducive to the world of kings and his multiple wives/concubines/sex slaves. That kind of rigid structure or hierarchy just doesn’t work in in a hunter/gatherer society. That’s why many practice strong egalitarian traditions.

This makes sense in terms of sheer pragmatism. In a society of hunter/gatherers where you’re only working with small tribes, you can’t be too much of a bigot. Everyone has to pitch in. Everyone has to share. You can’t be too big an asshole because you won’t survive without your tribe, nor will you have a chance to have sex. From an evolutionary and society perspective, it’s a pretty good deal.

In this context, human beings are already well-wired for a more promiscuous society. In fact, as “Sex At Dawn” argues half-jokingly, it may be better for us overall. You need only look at the happy, sexy lives that Bonobo chimps live. They have a lot of sex. They rarely fight. Even by hippie standards, they’re pretty chill.

At the moment, we humans can’t live those lives. Our world is too developed, too connected, and too vast for our caveman brains to make sense of. Add nasty diseases that can now use sex to effectively spread and it just isn’t pragmatic anymore, even if our biology favors it.

That may change very soon though. Once tools like CRISPR and contraceptives like Vasalgel are refined, those barriers are gone. We can safely exercise the same libido that our ancestors got to enjoy. What will that do for society? What will that do for the dynamics between men and women? It’s hard to imagine, but it’s a damn sexy idea that’s worth imagining.

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Filed under Sexy Future

Tagged as CRISPR, disease, future of love, futurism, infectious disease, love, medical breakthroughs, medical science, passion, promiscuity, relationships, sex, sex in society, sexuality, sexually transmitted disease, STD, STI, technology

Category Archives: Sexy Future

Sex Robots, The Risks, And The Impact On Our Sex Lives

How Immortal Humans (Might) Make Love

Khan Academy: The (Near) Future Of Education?

The Future Of Education (And The Demise Of Idiots)

Will Sex Robots Make Us Better People?

A Second Sexual Revolution: The Potential (And Inevitable) Backlash

A Second Sexual Revolution: The (Sexy And Non-Sexy) Possibilities

A Disease-Free World: We’re More Ready Than You Think

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