FUTURE HUMAN
Sex Robots Could Save Your Relationship
And more good news on the future of love
Anyone who has watched even a fraction of Hollywood’s sci-fi offerings is primed for a mind-boggling future of interstellar travel, superpowers, and brain uploads. And yet, when it comes to sex, science fiction almost always circles back to two dreary, retrograde options. Either we’re in a Jetsons world of traditional nuclear families with flying cars or a Logan’s Run dystopia of hedonism and early death. It’s as if everything in the world is going to transform, but sex will be stuck in the 1960s.
And yet it’s clear today that the evolution of sex shows no signs of slowing down. Marriages once unthinkable in the United States — between people of different races, or two people of the same gender — are currently sanctioned by the federal government. Those not in a marrying frame of mind can arrange for sexual encounters that had no name a century ago, using apps invented last year.
Over the next century, we’ll be redefining ideas as old as humanity itself. Marriage will fragment into many kinds of committed intimacy, gender will prism into a spectrum of identities, and humans will bring robots into the bedroom (possibly in ways that actually improve our human relationships). But a deeper current of change runs…
