I’m having cleverbot flashback here and let me tell you they’re weird. If you remember it was cleverbot which would start the whole deal. The internet did things to that chatbot alright.
But perhaps the most striking claim from the report is that by 2050 robot sex could overtake human sex. “Virtual sex with AIs or robots will compete with human sex, but robots will be expensive,” it states. “It might feel very pleasant, and will be perfect for those people who want to live their ultimate fantasy without all the strings and emotional commitments of real relationships.”
Total fertility rates in developed countries are already below – and in some cases, far below – replacement rate. I am thinking that this isn’t gonna help.
masturbation already is higher than human sex and plenty of human sex is intentionaly non procreative. Robot sex would mostly pull from the masterbation pool. It will be the sex people do returning alone from the bars.
Also people are glossing over the capability for it to improve sexual drive.
The “my wife read a slightly spicy book today and now she wants to get it on” trope is well known on social media, AI’s ability to just generate whatever you want likely will boost that.
However, at this time AI is unable to really handle pacing well.
It’s pretty well known that most attempts with current uncensored LLMs tends to produce saucy encounters are… poorly paced.
Good spicy novels have a lot of build up and slow pace, which requires remembering facts from many chapters ago.
Even the top end of massive LLMs lack the memory capacity to last more than a handful of pages before they completely lose the thread.
Robot sex would mostly pull from the masterbation pool.
It seems to me that one could make the same argument for oral contraception. I didn’t go ram the data through statistics software, but I have eyeballed the TFR history of some countries, and you can see a correlation between legal oral contraception being associated with a falloff in fertility (side note, though – the same couldn’t be said of abortion, or at least I couldn’t see it).
There was a talk I remember a while back from Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian professor of politics. Kaufman’s particular talk was focusing less on the overall impact on countries of low fertility and more on the internal political changes – in the presence of oral contraception, the religious tend to have a substantially higher number of kids than do the irreligious, which has very real political impacts:
Secondly the link between sex and procreation has now been broken by contraception. So, how large your family is is increasingly a choice and when it becomes a choice your values – whether you’re secular or fundamentalist – take on a much greater importance and so it’s really as we move into modernity that cultural values start to matter more for fertility and – this comes out of something called second demographic transition theory in demography – so the link there, sorry the trend, towards very low fertility is spearheaded by secular people. Throughout the world, next to a woman’s marital status, and her education, her religiosity is the most important predictor of how many children shall have, and so seculars are spearheading this trend towards very low fertility and the religious – particularly fundamentalists – are resisting this shift, which is in fact the shift that’s driving the great shrinking that we’re talking about, or at least one of the causes of the great shrinking. And not only that, as populations decline, as fertility rates drop, the percentage difference between religious and secular increases. Because if you think about it, if fundamentalists have five children and seculars four, that’s only a 20% advantage. If fundamentalists have two and seculars one, that’s a 100 percent advantage.
So, I’m more interested in the impact of reduced fertility on a country overall than Kaufmann, who is interested in the effects on its internal political makeup, but I think that he’s got a real point that there are some very considerable long-range effects of breaking the link between sex and procreation. I’d expect various forms of simulated or robotic sex to tend to travel further down the path that oral contraception did, create additional downwards pressure on TFR.
I actually don't see oral contraception as equivalent. That is about not wanting to breed whereas robot sex is just about getting off. so manual masterbations next level is toys and robots would be the next level still. That being said Im fine with anything keeping people from having kids they don't truly want.
While the Spike Jonze film Her (2013) explored a romance between a man and his virtual personal assistant, 10 years earlier, the movie Demolition Man looked at how technology could play a role in sexual relationships. In an iconic scene, a character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger has virtual sex with Sandra Bullock.
Was this article written by AI? Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t in Demolition Man, and 1993 was not ten years before 2013.
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