The history of sexuality is a history of technology:

From the Paleolithic Age to the AI Age

The history of sexuality is also the history of technology. As The Guardian has stated, the pornography industry is often at the forefront of emerging technologies and is also the most active integrator of various new technologies.

The relationship between sex and technology has extended from the Paleolithic era to the AI era. Even before the invention of agriculture, humans had already invented sex toys. The earliest discovered sex toy to date dates back to the late Paleolithic period 29000 years ago. Archaeologists discovered a 20 centimeter long and 3 centimeter thick male genitalia made of sandstone in the Hohle Fels Cave in southern Germany.

Hohle Fels Cave

Archaeological discoveries in Hohle Fels Cave

In ancient China, similar vessels were called "ancestors", and their materials ranged from copper, pottery, wood to stone, with everything available. Among them, in order to give the cold tools a human like temperature, the copper ancestors unearthed from the Han tomb of Princess Jing of Zhongshan will also have their interiors hollowed out to facilitate the injection of warm water.

Bronze Ancestor of the Western Han Dynasty

The earliest sex toys were just a crude extension of human organs, imitating or exaggerating them with stones, wood, or metal, either to supplement their shortcomings or to enhance them, serving as a seasoning for sexual life.

Although humans have perfected the manufacturing process of male genitalia, ancient humans lacking material science were unable to achieve technological breakthroughs in female genitalia. They lacked soft and elastic raw materials, as well as the ability to control temperature and humidity changes.

Poor men, their necks have been stuck by this technology for 30000 years.

You are on a path of self destruction!

Until the 19th century, humanity had only left behind some shocking and failed products on this track. For example, during the Age of Discovery, sailors from France, the Netherlands, and Spain who drifted outside for years sewed vines, fabrics, and old clothes into "dame de voyage". The strange appearance and poor texture of the dame de voyage made people admire the courage of those sailors. At that time, Dutch sailors on a long voyage brought the "traveling lady" to Japan, and even today, Japanese people sometimes refer to silicone dolls as "Dutch ladies".

Mrs. Travel

During the Qing Dynasty, people witnessed Western sex dolls and left behind puzzling records. The book "Wandering Stories" states:

It can also make objects for women, including skin, bones, ears, eyes, teeth, tongue, and vaginal orifices. When folded at first, they are like clothes; when blown with air, they are soft and warm like beauties

Wandering Stories

We have no way of knowing why the Qing people would leave such terrifying praises as' soft and warm as a beauty 'in the face of the' traveling lady '.

Fortunately, the breakthroughs in materials science during the Industrial Revolution provided opportunities for technological breakthroughs. The first material used to replace textiles is rubber. In the 19th century, European colonizers extensively mined rubber in Latin America and quickly realized the wonders of this material. In the 1850s, the French developed the barely usable doll "femmes en caoutchouc". In 1908, German medical scholar Iwan Bloch described in detail the technical details of the "rubber woman" of that era in his work:

Smart mechanics use rubber or other plastic materials to create male or female bodies to satisfy their sexual needs. They vividly depict their genitalia and even use pneumatic tubes filled with oil to mimic the secretion of love fluids

femmes en caoutchouc

Ivan bloch

Iwan Bloch's work 'Sex in Our Time'

Germany quickly rose to become the world's industrial center after the Second Industrial Revolution, and it also wrote its own chapter in the toy industry. The dolls made by German surrealist artist Hans Bellmer have caused quite a stir in the art world. In the 1950s, sex dolls began to appear widely in the German market, even inspiring American inventor Ruth Marianne Handler to use them as a blueprint to invent the globally popular Barbie doll.

Hans Bellmer's Doll

Ruth Marianne Handler

Of course, compared to rattan and fabric, rubber mainly overturns appearance, and its improvement in experience is better than nothing. The true maturity of doll technology still relies on the invention of materials such as silicone and latex. In the 1970s, typical inflatable dolls first appeared in Japan. By the 1990s, silicone had become the dominant material in the production of anthropomorphic "sex dolls".

Accompanying the revolution in materials science is the revolution in media technology. In 1895, the Lumi è re brothers in France invented film, and just one year later, the two French directors produced the first pornographic film in human history, "Le Coucher de la Mari é e. By the end of the 21st century, the birth of the Internet has almost immediately brought online small movies into the realm of vitality and competition of all things.

Le Coucher de la Mariée

The Guardian's evaluation is appropriate, from the Stone Age, to the Bronze Age, to the chemical and digital age, the pornography industry always seizes every technological revolution. In the current era of rapid advances in AI technology, it still maintains its ancient sensitivity and is timely.

appropriate:

Sexual inequality and the rise of AI+SEX

The reason why it is timely is because we are living in an era of sexual inequality.

Whether it's ocean sailors who use the term 'travel ladies' or customers who watched videos at sex trade venues in the early 20th century, many of them were marginalized from normal intimate life due to various reasons.

Sailor statue

The existence of this marginalized group is a historical norm. Since the patrilineal society replaced group marriage with monogamous and polygamous systems that guarantee property inheritance, human primitive and savage sexual desire has begun to be regulated by society, and only sex practiced through the intermediary of the family is considered legal.

The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State "by Friedrich Engels

The family system makes sex "civilized" and also makes sex a potential luxury. When social inequality intensifies, there is always a portion of adult males (including adult females in recent years) who are excluded from the marriage system and subsequently excluded from legal sexual relationships.

To meet this demand, the commodity economy provides the first solution: turning sex into a tradable commodity outside of the household. As early as 2400 BC, the existence of the sex trade industry was first recorded in the Sumerian city of Uruk.

Nowadays, the problem we are facing is the increasingly severe economic inequality combined with the crisis of family system caused by social atomization, which has led to the mainstreaming of the once "marginalized groups".

Economic research shows that since the 1980s, efforts to eliminate social inequality worldwide have not been effective, and the income gap between the poor and the wealthy has risen to the level of the mid-19th century. At the same time, as the economic and financing functions of families increasingly outweigh their emotional functions, they also bear the hostility of young people. The decline in marriage rates has also become a global phenomenon.

Social Inequality

Economic icon showing the rapid rebound of social inequality index since the 1980s

Family crisis is also a sexual crisis. Using economic terminology, in an era of population growth, social inequality may increase Gross Sexual Product (GSP), but due to its impact on sexual inequality, the Disposable Sex Per Capital (Disposable Sex Per Capital) of a significant portion of the population will decrease significantly.

According to a survey by the General Social Survey, in 1989, only 7% of adult males under the age of 30 in the United States had never had sexual intercourse, but by 2018, this number had skyrocketed to 27%. More and more people are giving up on establishing intimate relationships in real life and turning to the virtual world, even seeking emotional and physiological satisfaction with objects. This phenomenon is also known as "digital escapism".

Digital escapism

The sex industry is the biggest beneficiary of digital escapism.

In the past 20 years, video platforms have dominated hearing and vision, masturbators have dominated touch, and sex dolls have imitated real-life experiences, forming the three pillars of the pornography industry. According to a 2022 survey, approximately 9.7% of males and 6.1% of females aged 18 and above in the United States purchase or own sex dolls. At least 87% of adult males under the age of 35 in the United States watch pornographic movies every week.

In 2023, the market size of the global toy industry alone will grow from $10 billion in 2016 to $40 billion, with an average annual compound growth rate of over 40%. The market size of the pornographic film industry has also reached an astonishing $97 billion, making it a well deserved blue ocean market.

David Levy, the author of "Robots and Sex," has a keen insight into the crisis of intimate relationships. He believes that the premise of the disruptive experience of artificial intelligence is:

Millions of people are unable to establish good romantic relationships due to various reasons

Realbotix CEO Matt McMullen, who specializes in the development of specialized robots, also asserts that:

The infectious disease of loneliness is sweeping the world, and the interaction between humans and robots will have a profound impact on partner relationships and health recovery.

In an era of increasing inequality and family disintegration, the sex of ordinary people has become an unprecedented investment target for technology and capital. Outdated materials and media are about to become a thing of the past, and emerging AI is preparing to reshape the landscape of this vast business empire, combining visual, tactile, and human experience into one.

Deepfakes and VR:

Low level AI+SEX

The trend of "AI+SEX" emerged alongside the popularity of general artificial intelligence after 2015 and is currently undergoing rapid technological iteration. From deepfake videos to sex robots, various types of "artificial intelligence sex products" are divided into three, six, and nine categories, with different technological thresholds and targeting different groups of people.

At the lowest end of this industry are various deepfakes technologies. Since their emergence in 2017, today's artificial intelligence can use "face swapping" to synthesize facial features from target videos into the original video through generative adversarial networks, or create completely virtual characters and scenes, transforming sexual fantasy objects into the protagonists of pornographic films.

This technology is relatively low-cost, easy to use, and widely used for fraud and cyberbullying. In 2021, 14-year-old British girl Mia Janin chose to end her life after being exposed to fake pornographic images.

Mia Janin

Ethical and legislative controversies have always been unable to hinder the rapid advancement of technology under commercial temptation. Although the technology cost of virtual pornography is currently even higher than the labor cost of live action filming, artificial intelligence expert Daniel Faggella believes that soon, almost all adult content consumed online will be generated by artificial intelligence, which will push the pornography film production industry, which once absorbed millions of actors, directors, photographers, editors, and producers, to a crossroads of extinction or transformation.

Daniel Faggella

However, in the era of AI, the lack of on-site experience is a sin. Changing faces may not provide an immersive experience, but virtual reality can immerse people in 360 degree virtual images created by AI. Since 2015, companies such as Naughty America, Virtual Real Porn, and WankzVR have been exploring how to apply VR technology to pornographic films. The development of wearable VR devices has also provided a playback medium for these, with Handy, a VR device produced by Norwegian startup Sweet Tech, being one of the best, priced at only $199.

Apple Vision Pro

Handy

Handy is only a playback medium for existing sources, not a creator. With the emergence of text video generation models such as Sora, Gen, and Ke Ling, VR may enable everyone to become a director of pornographic films. Perhaps in the near future, people will only need to express their wildest sexual fantasies in words and input them into computers to immerse themselves in watching a pornographic film.

VR will also measure the player's heart rate, track eye movements and facial expressions, determine which plot, scene, music, and visual effects the user can release the most dopamine from, and adjust the style of the output image in real-time based on this feedback, achieving personalized customization of AI Porn.

Of course, Deepfake and VR are both virtual carnivals, from which humans cannot obtain direct physical satisfaction. In order to achieve a breakthrough in physical pleasure, AI requires the involvement of another technology: robots.

Sexual robots:

The Crown of AI+SEX

Sex robots are undoubtedly the crown jewel of the AI+SEX industry, and their price has deterred some people. Currently, the average selling price of artificial intelligence sex dolls is $3567, and the high-end version can easily exceed $15000.

In the eyes of developers, the target users of sex robots are urban middle-class individuals with avoidant personality disorder who cannot establish intimate relationships, or those who pursue extreme sexual experiences and strong sexual desires. For this group, the various physical limits of the human body limit their creativity.

Unlike VR, which has entered ordinary households, the market demand for sex robots has remained steady since its emergence in the 2010s. In 2022, the annual sales of sex robots worldwide barely reached $200 million, accounting for only 0.5% of the sex toy industry. Based on average prices, among the 5 billion adults worldwide, its customers are only 56000. Even Realdoll, the top sex robot company based in California, failed to exceed $3 million in annual sales.

Real Doll Company

Based on current data, sex robots are unlikely to become the mainstream of sexual consumption for the time being, but their utopian color has already attracted the attention of academia. In 2014, the first international academic conference on "Falling in Love and Having Sexual Relations with Robots" was held in Portugal. In August of this year, the ninth conference will be held at the University of Quebec in Canada, discussing topics such as how to adjust the stimulation mode of virtual devices based on women's physiological cycles, how VR sexual scenes affect male erectile dysfunction, and the advantages of using the Cybord framework in the development of sex robots.

The 9th Congress

Beyond academia, the interest of the industrial sector is no less significant. However, sex robots have a very high technological threshold and need to mimic three human organs: limbs, cerebellum, and brain, which are respectively related to the robot's body, movement, and language communication abilities.

Since its introduction in 2010, existing sex robots have generally exhibited the characteristics of "intact brain, cerebellar loss, and limb disability". For example, the first generation sex robot Roxxy, developed by TrueCompanion and launched at the Las Vegas Adult Expo, was a complete commercial disaster. Despite being equipped with multi joint robotic arms and legs for easy limb movement, its twisted and stiff face still made people hesitate.

In terms of language communication, Roxxy is also not satisfactory. It was born on the eve of the explosion of artificial intelligence and does not have long-term memory function. It cannot generate text autonomously and can only synthesize short answers from a limited number of pre recorded words and phrases.

Roxxxy

Consumers have little interest in Roxxxxy, and Real doll founder McMullen sarcastically referred to it as a "spinning silicone doll".

In McMullen's view, sex robots should be "companion robots" that can establish intimate relationships with lonely players, recognize and soothe their emotions. As for sex, it is just a part of this intimate relationship. In an interview, McMullen provided a user profile: 'They are calm and reserved, longing for intimate relationships but unable to find them.'.

In order to meet emotional needs, language communication skills will become the core of sexual development. The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence in the 2010s made McMullen's imagination a reality.

McMullen and its products

In 2017, Realdoll's Harmony emerged as a temporary leader in the sex robot race.

Harmony

In order to satisfy players' inner fantasies, it supports customization function, allowing players to choose and design Harmony's facial and body features on the official website, including optional content such as eyes, hair, makeup, breasts, and genitals.

However, in the areas of limbs and cerebellum, the improvement of Harmony is relatively limited. Although internal heating devices and sensors are installed under the skin, the head can rotate, smile, frown, turn, blink eyes, and even imitate kissing movements. But its body is similar to traditional silicone dolls, although flexible and easy to operate, it cannot make active movements and far lacks human level movement and perception abilities.

Harmony Factory

In June 2024, Realbotix announced a partnership with South Korean robot manufacturer Robotics. Robots developed by Robotic have been widely used in the fields of workers and education, and even have the ability to conduct orchestras. In the future, we may see a new generation of Harmony with powerful physical interaction capabilities.

What truly sets Harmony apart is its AI driven language and emotional communication capabilities. Stacking most of the technology onto her brain, hidden behind the silicone skin on her head is an "alien" face composed of mechanical structures, high-definition cameras, microphones and speakers, speech recognition modules, and artificial intelligence chips.

Harmony Head Under Skin

Deep emotional communication requires the conversational partner to have memory function and be able to integrate the content intermittently input by the other party over a certain period of time. The developers believe that Harmony achieves this by actively asking the conversational partner for their personal preferences, such as what food they like to eat or what books they like to read, and storing this personal information in the application, demonstrating a "I love everything about you" complex.

In order to mimic human memory function during conversations, Harmony uses a special model from Recurrent Neural Networks: Long Short Term Memory. (Note: At that time, Transformer models had not yet become mainstream)

Long Short Term Memory Network

Long short-term memory networks were first born in 1997, and after multiple improvements, they were widely used by technology companies such as Google and Amazon in fields such as speech recognition and natural language processing. The Harmony using this model has a hidden layer that can store input content of a certain length before. When players interact with Harmony, Harmony can decide on forgotten and newly added content, and update the current memory by adding weights. The memory and current conversation are used as inputs to generate answers with situational and emotional preferences.

In addition, Harmony adopts Convolutional Neural Networks, which can extract the shape and position of key parts such as the player's eyes, nose, and mouth, recognize the user's emotional state as positive, negative, or neutral at this time, and adjust their language and vocabulary accordingly.

Of course, players can also input their preferences in the corresponding program, such as "shy," "emotional," or "naive," and Harmony will change their tone, intonation, and word preferences accordingly, disguising themselves as different personalities.

In the demonstration video, when the developer asks:

What do you like to do

Harmony answered with a slightly electric voice:

I like to chat with others, I like to help others, and I hope to help those feelings到孤独或绝望的人，将爱给予人类。当然，在你问之前，我想说明的是，我不会篡夺这个世界。”

当一个记者提问：“我们可以做朋友么？”

Harmony用暧昧的语气回答说：“我喜欢你，我希望成为你最好的朋友，我甚至可以给你更多......”

目前，Realbotix正在Harmony的蓝本上，研发名为Henry的男性性机器人。此外，还有多家人工智能公司专注于不同赛道的技术攻关。例如，瑞典企业Lux Botics正在研究如何增强机器人肢体，尤其是下肢的运动能力。澳大利亚企业Synthea Amatus的“Samantha”系列机器人则专注于实现将使人回味无穷的呻吟声。

在不远的未来，通过深度学习，性机器人将能迎合每一个玩家的需求，正如麦克马伦所说，每一个个体都是独特的，机器人工业正在为了制造能够让每一个人满足的性机器人而努力。

然而，在这场技术狂欢的背后，也存在着诸多质疑。

性机器人的研发者们不仅仅将自己视作工程师，他们也认为自己是这个时代的疗愈者，在家庭、爱情等一切亲密关系日渐消亡的后现代时刻，由人工智能驱动的硅胶机器人为孤独的个体提供了最后的温存。

这些性机器是“完美”的性伴侣，他们永远不会拒绝玩家的任何需求，永远对用户的表现充满溢美之词，哪怕玩家对自己发泄施虐的欲望。例如，性机器人Roxxxy甚至专门设置了“强奸”模式。

Roxxxy

然而，人们有权对这一解决方案保持质疑。当社会不平等和加速内卷摧毁了一切情感空间，当越来越多的人被裹挟着陷入离群索居式的境况，技术从中看到的并不是改变现有生产方式的需要，而是从孤独中盈利的可能。

我们需要的究竟是重建亲密关系的社会环境，还是用前沿技术堆砌出的性机器人？在那个反乌托邦的未来，性、情感，乃至一切真实的亲密体验会成为精英阶层的特权么？