The Scary Future Of Robot Sex & Artificial Love - Roanne van Voorst

You say that you delved into the frontiers of human sexuality with anthropological fieldwork. What's that mean?

Well, I'm a futures anthropologist, which I think is probably the weirdest profession in the world, because anthropologists, typically, we do ethnography amongst the people that we study, um, which you can't really do if you study futures, like I do. But what I can do is go to those places in the world and to those people in the world where already you can see glimpses of the future, so that's what I did also with this research project. I went to sex brothels where there's only dolls, no more humans, or I tried to befriend an AI. You know, those were the things I did. So, um, yeah, it ended up in a book.

How would you categorize what is happening to modern human sexuality?

Well, it's a very strange and interesting time, I find. Uh, w- we're now at this transition where on the one hand you see all this technology, um, p- probably just offering us solutions for problems that we often didn't really knew we had. Um, you know, it's like, "Here, this will make things easier," or, "Here, this will avoid you having to do such and such," and I'm sure we'll dive into it. Um, and what it does lead us to is to a very frictionless life, if I may call it that. It's just, um, less vulnerability, um, less human-to-human awkwardness, but more quickness, more efficiency, more I'm getting everything that I want. And then on the other hand, it's also a really interesting time, because this always sounds very depressing, I find, and a lot of the chapters in the book are a bit concerning or, or just really weird. Uh, but then there's also this really cool era in which we live in which people create or are able to create the kind of love or intimacy life that they want, right? So, I write about people who say, "Well, perhaps romance is not my thing in life, but I have a bunch of really good friends and I'm buying a house with them and I'm living intimately with them." Or I write about really old people, 85 years old plus, who still have a really good sex life because we get older and get older more healthily. So, it's, it's a free time, I would say, but also a really high technological time, really ƒ... you know.

Yeah. It's v- it is, it is interesting to think about w- we have more freedom, uh, there is more technology, everything is being enabled. There is this frictionless access to new partners or more partners or to get rid of your old partner, to not have to see them around anymore. You know, like blocking someone on the internet basically makes them die unless you're gonna see them by accident in the real world. So, I understand, but obviously the question and the concern that a lot of people have is, is this hyper-convenience actually making us any happier or is it s- kind of like a weird limbic hack that we have where humans have this, um, preference, this sensitivity, uh, for... th- th- they're seduced and allured by stuff that's easy and convenient, but that doesn't always mean that it's the thing that's best for them.