More Human than Human

Cyborgs, embeddables, and androids, oh my.

Never has the question, “what does it mean to be human?” been more relevant than right now. Granted in five or ten years, that question will surround an even more thought-provoking, conflicted world, however, for the time being, it forces us to confront the reality of our evolving technology and potentially devolving humanity.

The wearables movement hit business and society with the promise of heralding a change in the very way we live and while it yet may, wearables are really nothing new; they are more intricate and complex extensions of the technologies we as a species have been wearing for thousands of years. VR headset, running shoe, knife – a seemingly unrelated list, yet taken in the same breath, we can view them all as temporarily ‘worn’ tools that help to augment and expand the limits of the human body.

One could argue that the embeddables movement accomplishes the same thing: the ability to augment and expand the limits of the human body. However, one stark difference stands between wearables and embeddables: permanence.  This implicates not a temporary boost in human capability, but a fixed, unnatural evolution in our body’s design. In short, there’s no guarantee of being able to hit Ctrl-Z. By contrast to wearables, which we can view as external tools, embeddables have the potential to be seen not as independent objects, but as integrated extensions of ourselves.

If we build off of this loose definition, an argument could easily be made that society has a long history of embeddables as well. The cardiac pacemaker was first conceptualized in the 20s and first implanted into a human subject in the 50s. Though if we look beyond active embeddables, we can view a long history of passive attachments to our bodies such as fake eyes, prosthetic limbs, intramedullary rods, and dentures dating back hundreds if not thousands of years.

Still, something is different about the emerging generation of body modifications. We are teetering on the edge of a time when embeddables and bodily integrated technologies are being viewed not simply as restorative, but augmentative and enhancing. We are no longer simply thinking about how to replace a lost limb, faulty organ, or broken body part, but instead are now asking the question of how we can improve upon nature’s design. And while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, we need to at least acknowledge the implications of cracking ourselves open and tinkering with the fleshy bits. We need to realize that elective surgeries and hacks to ourselves will have consequences, both immediate and long-term, personal, and societal.

The potential for bodily harm is an obvious risk and one that will be taken at varying degrees by a range of people who opt to roll the dice on more unproven procedures all the way to the rigorously routine. And while a few people will undoubtedly die on the operating table, or a cardboard mat in a dark back alley, I view a much more frightening risk about the decade-plus implications of a population of people stuffing themselves with servos and circuits with no long-term testing. These could alter our physiology and cause massive issues with chronic pain or disablement. The use of chemicals or electromagnetic communication could lead to mutations and bring on new forms of cancer variants. The potential for harm is literally as diverse as the spectrum of things we choose to shove inside of ourselves.

From a societal perspective, there are some pretty scary thought exercises to mull as well. While the augmentation of human ability will potentially do wonders for our efficiency as humans and push the limits of human achievement, outside of a socialist utopia, only a select group of individuals will benefit from these breakthroughs. The class divide will be as present within the embeddable movement as it is within any other facet of our world, however, unlike other aspects of our lives, this divide will manifest as literally making certain people better human beings than others. You won’t simply have more money, more things, and greater access, you will literally have a stronger body, smarter brain, and longer lifespan.

At an extreme, this divide could become less about classism and even start to be viewed as a specist. While other “isms” may fade with time, concern over the colour of your skin, sexual orientation, or faith could simply be replaced by judgment of the electromechanical contents of your body. Yet far from the organic-purist view often portrayed in popular science fiction of judging cybernetically-enhanced individuals as some form of digital-junkie, the reality is far more likely that it will be the enhanced who have the funds to augment themselves and who will hold power, and judgment, over technologically “lesser” individuals. This is a frightening world for both sides, as history has more than its fair share of examples of the downtrodden rising up against extreme discrepancies of quality of life and redistributing the wealth of power –rather gruesome imagery in the case of body implants.

And while my last point raises an alarming issue on a societal level, the same considerations must be brought down to the reality of the individual. Modifications to the body of such an extreme nature bring into focus the existential questions raised at the start of this article. Are androids and cyborgs human, or some other species entirely and if so, where do we make that divide? Regardless, what are the implications of turning our historically sacred biological beings into commoditized vessels with swappable parts and quarterly upgrade modules?

Well beyond phantom limb syndrome, the human brain may not be capable of adapting to such massive bodily modifications and even if it is at a functional level, what of mental health? As we spiral further into this physical loss of self, how will we emotionally cope with the reality of not recognizing our own flesh and bone when it becomes silicone and steel? With our current hyperactive, digital existence already contributing to a host of issues around depression, identity crisis, and social isolation, it is easy to imagine how the further integration of technology, not only into our lives but our very beings, will only exacerbate these issues. We will mourn limbs actively chosen to be replaced or augmented. We will yearn to silence the digital voices actively being streamed into our minds. We will feel uncomfortable within our own skin, sensing the ticks, tocks, and buzzes of something unnatural underneath. In short, we could reject what we have become, even if it is of our own making.

While anyone who reads my articles would likely agree that I am far from being considered a sobering voice in the field of technoethics, we’re remiss not to ask the moral and ethical questions at hand. I could care less about playing god, however, I do understand that for millennia we have held technology as a collection of tools to support and enhance our lives, and all of that is about to change. The looming singularity does not simply change the nature of technology or our relationship to it, but the very essence of what it means to be human. Who among us is ready or worthy to shoulder that burden of responsibility?

Cyborgs Among Us

Far from being the stuff of freaky science fiction, countless examples exist of embeddable technology that people have stuffed inside of themselves in order to become more human than human.

·         Artificially ‘Enhanced’

While in many cases, artificially grown ears, heart valves, bladders, and other organs can be life-altering or lifesaving procedures, recent work being done by an institute in North Caroline has shown promise for growing artificial penises and vaginas. Though the work is presently being promoted for individuals with congenital abnormalities or post-trauma, it doesn’t take much to envision another, much more lucrative elective application for such a breakthrough.

·         Night Vision Eyes

A team in California recently enhanced a man’s eyeballs with Chlorin e6, a substance found in deep-sea fish, in order to allow him to have more sensitive vision to better recognize objects in low-light. Though temporary, this type of experiment highlights our ability to alter our own body’s chemistry to enhance our senses.

·         Blade Runners

Popularized by Oscar Pistorius’ inspiring victories (and later tragic arrest), many amputees are still able to compete athletically through the use of engineered carbon-fibre prosthetics, or blades, that enhance sprinting. However, Pistorius’ success within able-bodied competition raised criticism over having a technologically unfair advantage that one would assume will be a source of even more contention as the technology improves and biological legs are viewed as inferior.

·         Wet Ware

Though envisioned by William Gibson’s short story, Johnny Mneumonic, cybernetic neural implants may not be simply science fiction as DARPA has been developing a neuromodulatory device called ElectRX. As our understanding of the brain continues to progress, such devices use small electrical stimulations throughout the nervous system to achieve a variety of desired outcomes from removing joint pain to promoting healing.

·         Ear Speakers

A Nevada-based bodyhacker had small magnets implanted in his tragus (cartilage just outside the ear) in 2013 to act as small, in-ear speakers activated by a magnetic coil worn around his neck. While initially crude, this type of experiment paves the way for humans to have a discreet, permanent audio link to others and the web for anytime access.

Dr. Me

Let’s start by taking the following as givens:

•            As the growing elderly population floods the healthcare system, it will introduce a strain that our current methods of care will not be able to properly handle

•            The desire for patient empowerment will continue to shift greater care responsibilities away from traditional providers and towards the individual who will manage themselves

•            Medical technologies will aid this empowerment by commoditizing historically complex and expensive medical procedures into common tasks performed by smartphone accessories

•            Medical diagnosis and treatment knowledge will become universally and freely available and, more importantly, translated into humanistic, accessible language to be used by all

The convergence of these trends and more will lead us to, in my opinion, two inevitabilities. First will be a healthcare renaissance. By placing the knowledge, technology, and responsibility for care in the hands of everyday people, we will upset thousands of years of reliance upon medical professionals. We will change the basic roles in the healthcare system out of both desire and necessity. We will reserve doctors as consultants for only the most complex and challenging medical conditions. We will give greater authority to nurses and technicians to carry out increasingly common and routine medical functions. We will create machines capable of automating a number of medical procedures such as surgery and basic checkups. And at the center of all of this will sit you and I: everyday individuals who will essentially act as our own GPs and be the centerpiece of monitoring, managing, and making decisions about our own health.

The second inevitability will be the absolute clusterfuck that ensues around giving every Tom, Dick, and Harry their own stethoscope and telling them “you’re in charge.” While the health community will undoubtedly do their best and take every precaution to transfer this responsibility seamlessly and effectively, if history has anything to say about how changes to our health system roll out, we can anticipate at least a few hiccups. Misinformation, wrongful self-experimentation, abuse of medications and treatments, and medical obsessions are only a few of the challenges that await this “utopian”, fully-empowered health system. And while guys like me will do our best to help design a system that is completely foolproof, I am reminded of the Douglas Adams quote: “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

Bigger, Stronger, Faster, Deader

Naturally, we can expect many people to abuse these newfound tools and responsibilities. In true human fashion, it’s never enough to simply be healthy, and one could easily imagine the use of devices and medications to be experimented with in an attempt to augment and enhance our bodies. However, when is enough, enough? In the pursuit of human perfection, how far will we push the baseline of health and our understanding of normalcy? We’re already starting to see these types of enhancements in experiments with night vision eyes, superior prosthetic legs, and even cosmetic surgeries. Where do we draw the line?

Some people may end up being successful with these modifications and could find ways of using medical technologies to push their abilities and health beyond the status quo. Others, largely bereft of the experience or intelligence to understand the consequences of their actions, will fail miserably, making themselves even sicker, possibly disabled, or, while simultaneously upping the competition in the annual Darwin awards, dead.

Black Market Care

Even with self-administered care available, limitations will obviously be put on the availability and dispensing of medicines or treatments. But fear not; where there’s a will, there’s a black market. In order to support the abuses outlined above, the underground economy will undoubtedly find a way to provide access to medications and technologies for your every whim and fancy. Even when considering legal access to medical resources, this reality simply highlights the need for new distribution models, which will emerge through whatever channels, above or below the board, it can.

Beyond simply enabling off-label use and abuse, the creation of such a market could have a host of knock-on effects present in any criminal activity – theft, murder, bribery, and all sorts of other fun for the whole family. In short, the medical black market of the future may make today’s drug trade look like a game of Monopoly. Perhaps some in the legal community also envision this future and are taking steps, such as the life imprisonment of Silk Road founder, Ross Ulbricht, to send a clear message reminding us that government is the only one who’s allowed to dabble in narcotics.

Hyper Hypochondriacs

We all have one of those friends who believes they’re always sick; whenever some new outbreak or condition is announced on the news, they’re convinced they have it. They got E. coli from their burger. They got an STD from a toilet seat. That rash on their arm is necrotizing fasciitis. Imagine what these types of people will do when you give them the knowledge, technology, and responsibility for diagnosing themselves. Suddenly, the blissful ignorance that so many of us living under the care of medical professionals enjoy will be snatched from our medically-apathetic selves. And for those who constantly fret and worry their bodies, we will show them the spiral through which they might decent into a medical information-fuelled madness.

While some hypochondriacs may actually benefit from the immediacy of self-monitoring, others will fall into this spiral of health and body obsession. They will collect every piece of data available on their body and scream bloody murder each time the slightest deviation surfaces in one of their health metrics. And worse than the massive time sink and anxiety source for these individuals, think of everyone around them (who is also a sort of doctor), who will have to listen and be consulted every time their heart skips a beat or shit comes out a slight off-shade of brown.

Medical Celebrities

Our celebrity-obsessed society may encounter a few issues in this empowered future as well. Initially, traditional celebrities – athletes, actors, models, etc. – will become templates for the rest of us to model our lives after. Instead of simply buying an athlete’s workout routine or a model’s diet cookbook, they’ll now be able to package and sell the full set of their health data to compare against and use as an unnatural target point for our own bodies. However, over time, we will enable an entirely new form of celebrity whose rise to fame will not be through athletic prowess or artistic talent, but simply the rarity of medical perfection. Individuals will be revered simply for having a numerically superior health makeup, and I shudder to envision the dangers and insanity around coveting better, yet unattainable for most, medical metrics.

Our obsession with such meaningless and impossible numbers will drive us to take unnatural actions in the name of better data. Drugs could be developed to artificially adjust the blood’s chemical composition. Surgeries could be performed to unnaturally raise or lower heart rate. We will lose sight of the importance of health and go to dangerous lengths to optimize our numeric health, potentially at the expense of our actual health.

In Closing

The scenarios presented are not intended to be prophecies of doom and gloom, but instead speculations on how our health system could evolve given the emerging shifts we see around us and our natural curiosity and human inclination to mess with everything we touch. If stakeholders in the health system are aware of the changing social and technological landscapes and are smart about their designs, these types of scenarios can likely be avoided. The last thing we need is for one of the greatest shifts in healthcare since the Hippocratic Oath to be mired by the irresponsible follies of man. However, we do love our follies.

I hope I’m wrong… I truly do. However, if anyone disagrees strongly, I’m open to bets.

Hacking the Body

Ryan O’Shea runs the business side of Grindhouse Wetware, a Pittsburgh collective of programmers, engineers, and enthusiasts working towards body augmentation using safe, affordable, and open-source technologies. Started in 2012 by a group of colleagues through the biohack.me forums, Grindhouse has rapidly grown into a key figure in the biohacking movement and gained a great deal of press through initiatives such as Tim Cannon’s 2013 implanting of the Circadia body monitor into his forearm.

The funny thing about a dialogue with a biohacker like Ryan O’Shea is that while he acknowledges that integrating machines into the human body to enhance ourselves is weird, the entirety of human history with technological development is also pretty weird, if you think about it. Airplanes, space travel, Facebook – in many ways we are already a transhumanist society and for people like Ryan, body hacking is simply the next logical step.

Yet when we begin to explore the traditional medical system, O’Shea’s tone is somewhat less empathetic. His frustration with the media and public’s views of biohackers as “disturbed people in basements cutting themselves open and jamming cellphones inside” is completely understandable when you learn of the impressive roster of scientific professionals working with the team. However, they do still work out of basements, garages and other places away from the public eye, largely out of necessity. Money aside, working from the coffers of a large biotech or academic institution would allow a much more professional setting, however, massively hinder the speed and transparency of their work through patents, regulation, ethics reviews, and other red tape.

So what can the medical community learn from a group of rag tag pioneers such as the Grindhouse crew? Through a conversation with Ryan O’Shea, we uncovered a few things where the pros could take note.

Medical Science’s Biomimicry

“People seem to be fine with getting a prosthetic limb if they need one, or getting a cochlear implant if their hearing is damaged. Medical science is fine with bringing people who are considered “damaged” in some way up to normal, but it seems largely uninterested in making “normal” humans better.”

While O’Shea’s point is very relevant in the recovery vs. enhancement argument, there is an even deeper learning here about the ways in which medical science treats the body. Due to either our conservatism or the limits of our imaginations, by and large the types of treatments we pioneer to humanity’s ailments are attempts to copy nature, assuming it had it right all along.

But we only need to look to examples like composite running blades, ultrasonic neural stimulation, and Chlorin e6 injectable night-vision to realize that the unnatural is at times a better way forward. While we have traditionally sought to restore body functionality to a state of normalcy through biomimicry, we are in essence setting for ourselves an upper-limit on the types of treatments we are able to create. This is a constraint not simply on the functionality of our bodies, but also a handcuffing of medical researchers who are told to hit the “sweet spot” of human ability – not too little and not too much.

Our Bodies are Vessels

“There’s this lingering belief that the human body is some perfectly crafted, preplanned organism. It’s not. It’s the byproduct of generations of accidental mutations, adaptation, and survival. Parts of our biology are vestigial remnants of our animalistic past.”

This extreme view should remind us that while it’s important to tend to the body’s ailments, ultimately the body is simply what transports and serves our minds. Each year, it seems, our advancements in prosthetics, artificial organs, and synthetic body chemicals leaps forward, while our understanding of the mind inches at a snail’s pace. We hold the body on a pedestal though as O’Shea points out, it is nothing more than a byproduct of centuries of evolution and our current attempts of integrating technology into the body, while somewhat risky, are simply an acceleration of this change.

The medical community needs to pull the human body off the pedestal and to stop enabling society’s narcissistic view of ourselves as Adonises. If this article’s first point has merit, then future treatments will likely inch further and further away from the body’s original state. If we do not begin to reset the norm of medical care to be one of optimizing ourselves instead of simply restoring the functionality of our evolutionarily-mutated flesh-bags, then we will begin to see a divergence in health between the trailblazers who are willing to hack their bodies and the stalwarts who are too scared to vaccinate their families with over 200 year-proven technology. Our bodies are not sacred temples. They are imperfect and at times broken systems that we need to get comfortable with augmenting or repairing through any means necessary if we truly want to optimize health.

DIY

“The fact that we choose to go the route of the open source, citizen science, and maker communities isn’t an indictment of our methodology or vision. If anything, it is a conscientious stand against ridiculous patents, hindering regulations, and bureaucratic red tape that would keep us from innovating how we see it.”

And perhaps the most obvious, yet important thing the medical community can learn from a group like Grindhouse is how to rapidly innovate. While decades of regulation have made our health systems more safe and reliable, this has also prevented the medical community from sprinting forward on many advances. Yes, we must always weigh the risks and consequences of our actions, however, those aware of the risks should have the choice to circumnavigate regulation.

This would allow the types of incredible pioneering work being done at places like Grindhouse, Science.Mic, Biohackspace, or DIYbio, to take place under far more safe, controlled, and scientific communities. It could mean that new drugs and new medical devices could be in-market within months instead of years. Regulation and property are crucial concepts for the business world, but when it comes to matters of our health, we have a moral imperative to serve the needs and health of people ahead of our organizations and governments. Yet until we resolve this dissonance, expect that more and more of the major medical breakthroughs you read about over the next decade will not come from the top Universities or Biotechs of the world, but by the basement-dwellers and hackers like Ryan O’Shea.

Death to Process

Process is designed to let us be stupid.

Though don’t take my harsh words the wrong way, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, it’s still a reality. Process has a positive side. It affords us consistency, reliability, simplicity, repeatability, and repeatability. It allows us to take complex tasks and break them down into much simpler parts to be executed by specialists or even automated by machines. At an extreme, process takes the world we live in and quantizes it into easy to manage, binary decisions and actions: do or don’t do. Ultimately, what it really affords us is efficiency. By optimizing each part of a process – though specialization, experience, and blind repetition – we can optimize the whole and create faster, bigger, stronger, better systems.

The other effect of this optimized worldview is that it reduces cognitive load. By boiling a complex sequence down to a series of simple steps, the true efficiency comes in never having to question the world around you, but instead simply becoming a master of your small domain. By allowing our world to exist between the confines of our inflows and outputs, we slowly lose is our ability to think beyond our stations and ourselves. We turn the brilliance and inquisitive nature of the human mind into a simple cog to be plugged into someone’s process. And because we’re lazy, we gladly bury our complications, trusting the giants whose shoulders we stand upon were facing the right direction and pointing us the right way when they set our process. For the most part, they probably were. For the most part, you can feel comfort, standing on those broad shoulders, gazing off into the great beyond to which their ancient, wise fingers point.

“For the most part” – you had to see this one coming.

The dawn of industrialization introduced more processes into our lives in the past 100 years than ever existed prior in the whole of human history. And yes, these processes have brought us massive efficiencies and vaulted our advancements forward exponentially. However, who’s to say that these processes will continue to hold as the best way forward? It’s not that process is a bad thing, it’s simply that it is a fragile thing. What works today has no guarantee of working tomorrow and as the world we live in continues to change at an ever-accelerating pace, this risk should scare us more and more.

Yet with the way we blindly charge forward, we don’t seem to be afraid. And even in lieu of catastrophic failure, what if our processes are holding us back and our complacency and laziness is the only thing getting in the way of even greater breakthroughs and innovations? How often do we stop and take the time to step back and see the bigger picture; to truly evaluate what we’re doing in a context broader than what’s expected of us and to ask questions that might at first seem foolish? How often do we ask “why?”

One of the things I love about my job is the ability to attack a problem with a certain sense of foolish ignorance. As consultants, we’re expected to be able to take on nearly any problem thrown at us. Given the diversity of what we work on, this necessarily means that we can’t be experts at everything. Yet, it is in this blissful ignorance that I often find comes our greatest strengths: naïve curiosity and the ability to make non-intuitive connections between diverse problems.

We do this not by strictly following process, but in fact by intentionally breaking it.

Because it is in the breaking of process that we force ourselves to think. We remove the guardrails that act as quick decision-making tools and question the underlying assumptions surrounding the task at hand. And, if there is a serious problem with the task at hand, this is precisely the type of thinking that we need – curious not complacent, skeptical not safe, and exploratory not efficient. We break process not to simply find holes in it and patch or improve them, but to rethink it entirely to constantly and consistently find entirely newer and better ways of doing things.

Take our Health practice as an example. Years ago, when we first started formalizing, we were confronted with an industry that largely served the financial needs of payers, the functional needs of doctors, and the tolerability of patients. But with a movement towards patient empowerment shifting the ground out from under the foundation of the industry, we questioned traditional healthcare models and built an entire practice on the understanding of a patient-first approach. We asked “why” such a heavy emphasis was placed on the system players while so little was given to the end-consumer and in an industry where decision-making authority is slowly shifting hands, this is exactly the question to be asking. Yet far from resting on our laurels or growing complacent, with each new project and each new problem, we re-evaluate the industry and patient experience to understand the hierarchy of needs we must serve and to add to our ever-evolving perspective on healthcare.

Though this role is exhausting, the potential pitfalls of not questioning ourselves are the business equivalent of setting cruise control on your car, letting go the steering wheel and letting our imperfectly designed systems steer us into the unknown. Granted this metaphor was a lot more compelling before self-driving cars became commonplace, but we can still understand the punch line: you may drift along safely for a while, but eventually an inevitable swerve in the road will send you careening off a cliff.

So I say death to process. To hell with the black belts. Leave the process to those who wish to play with cookie cutters. I, for one, would much rather play the role of the foolish skeptic. And though it takes every ounce of my being to fight my inner engineer and businessman each time I play the fool, I’ll gladly spend the energy because I’d rather be exhausted from swimming upstream than continue blindly down a path of self-fulfilling validity… even if I am wrong. At the end of the day, I’d rather be an exhausted fool than a cog.

Artificial Desire

Manufacturing lust, love, and everything in between for those who choose to build their partners rather than find them.

A cursory search of the mighty internet will reveal that I am far from the first person to write about this topic. In fact, in addition to countless books, articles, videos (ew), video games (double-ew), and preachy religious websites, this past November even saw the First International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots featuring such panels and presentations as “robot emotions,” “intelligent sex hardware,” and my personal favourite, “teledildonics.” While there is a lot of noise, frightening imagery, and confusion around the topic, one thing that most people agree on – except the religious extremists – is that love and sex with robots will eventually be commonplace, and likely in our lifetime. Hell, even Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with an AI – though admittedly, he may not be the best example to prove my point.

Pun completely intended, there are two ways to approach this topic: top-down (love) or bottom-up (sex).

Interestingly, the first instance of the concept of robotic love actually dates back to the first ever use of the term “robot.” In Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), artificial beings revolt against their creators; the play ends with a male and female robot falling in love and inheriting the earth. However, when it comes to interspecies erotica, the first instance of human-robot love – to my knowledge – was in Lester del Rey’s 1938 short story “Helen O’Loy.” The plot tells of two young men who modify a household robot to develop emotions. Helen, the robot, falls in love with one of the men who initially resists her but ultimately marries her. They grow old together and only in the story’s finale is it revealed that both men were actually in love with her all along.

Since these early works, countless pieces have been written by sci-fi authors over the years detailing robots developing emotions and falling in love with their engineering creators or vice-versa (and yes, the engineers also had to develop emotions). One of my personal favourites is William Gibson’s Idoru, where an aging rock star falls in love with a bodiless synthetic personality (artificial intelligence) and much hilarity and drama ensues. Gibson’s novel deals with many of the major themes you would expect: ethics, social stigma, misunderstanding, peer judgment, and the belief that our rock star, Rez, has lost his mind.

David Levy, arguably the foremost authority on the topic, even wrote a practical, and disturbingly thorough book on the topic detailing the cultural history of our fascination with robots and some of the far-reaching implications. In Love and Sex with Robots, he views our potential love of robots and AI as an extension of the affection people show towards their pets, phones, vehicles, or other non-human constructs. Like Gibson, Levy naturally acknowledges that this is all a bit weird and at least initially, will come with a certain layer of social stigma and judgment. However, he draws on historical examples such as oral sex, masturbation, and homosexuality to cite instances where public perception has gradually shifted towards acceptance in the initial face of outcry.

Regardless, if we push all that dull ethics and stigma stuff to the side for a moment and run with the premise of artificial sentience – that we will one day create robots capable of emotion – then isn’t the idea of people falling in love with robots not only plausible, but pretty much inevitable? A truly sentient AI should, in theory, be indistinguishable from human intelligence and therefore, falling in love with a robot should really be no different from falling in love with a person. Even if we haven’t quite perfected the hardware, one only need to look to the wedding parties in World of Warcraft or Second Life to realize that recent tech generations aren’t too bothered by the lack of physical form.

Yet, physicality is a part of love that shouldn’t be ignored and what fun would this article be if we didn’t get a bit mechanically depraved? First, to anyone who feels as though the idea of having sex with a machine is ignoble and disgusting, I’ll only briefly point to the multi-billion dollar global vibrator industry to highlight that we as a society seem to have no qualms about fucking machines. Granted, particularly in the early, unrefined days, the experience of sex with a physical robot may be more than a touch awkward and require a stretch of the imagination. However, we human beings seem to have few limits on what we can both imagine and accomplish, particularly when it comes to matters of the bedroom.

As you might have guessed, efforts to date largely serve the male market. You may have also guessed that the current leaders in this technology are coming out of Japan. While I would love to chat design points and engineering specifications for such marvels as the AutoBlow2, Fleshlight Vstroker, Machine Gun Happiness Browser, or Fuckzilla – and yes, these all exist – I’m going to focus in on the progression of Tenga: a Japanese company trying to define the future of masturbation. Beyond simply the main cylindrical unit, which Tenga claims that their “active detailed textures” are the most advanced on the market, the system integrates a Novint Falcon to move the cylinder and help simulate motion around the tube. Moreover, they have created a cartoon-virtual environment and, using an Oculus Rift, are able to essentially immerse the user in a VR cartoon porn with them as the male co-star. I’d describe the system further, however, it’s near impossible to do knowing that my family reads these articles and there are some hilarious videos on the internet of nerds getting mechanical handjobs at tech conferences that I’d rather you see for yourself.

So this is happening already and we can assume it will only get better (worse?). In theory, there are some great benefits to the prospect of robotic sex. It would be tremendously safe from an infection standpoint (though I won’t comment on the risk of mechanical failure). It could decrease levels of prostitution in both adults and children (though the thoughts of what robotic fantasies a child molester may envision make me want to crawl out of my skin). It would reduce complications of emotion, intimacy and sexual anxiety (you’re welcome, teenage boys). And of course, since it’s all about you, robotic sex would become a veritable home run derby of orgasms (but the romantic in me does feel there is something very sad about the concept of being able to program the “perfect orgasm”).

Of course, there is a catch to our robotic lovers: babies. While many of the darkest corners of our bedrooms and minds may have forgotten that the evolutionarily intended function of sex is procreation, the fact remains: the reason you get that special feeling when you look at a swell gal or fella is, in the strictest of biological senses, because your subconscious is trying to pass on its genetic code and continue the species. Yet, until we invent artificial fallopian tubes that pop out digital ovum or robotic testes capable of mass-scale production of cyber-sperm – each of which can fuse with human gametes to create some blasphemous homo-robo zygote – we might as well be shooting our loads into a sock.

And we need only look to the declining nation of Japan to see the effects of reduced birth rate. To be fair, Japan’s lackluster interest in babies has to do with strict social codes and a backlash against traditional marriage, and not the excessive fetishisation of technology (I was as surprised as you). However, the nation is already beginning to see the effects around the country. Reports have hypothesized the disappearance of smaller towns, the shrinking of national workforce, a risk of economic collapse, and in extreme scenarios, the extinction of an entire nation and culture.

These types of impacts outline a fairly solid counterpoint to the “if it feels good, do it” argument of robo-love and suddenly make the idea of falling in love with an AI, or buying the world’s greatest sexbot seem pretty selfish – if it means potentially contributing to the downfall of mankind. I’m not about to close this article by siding with the religious extremists, but from a purely long-term economic standpoint, maybe the sexbot community needs to consider designing for artificial polygamy or robotic three-ways.