Sex Robots and the Future of Physical Intimacy

Let's cuddle

Touch me, baby

The native cultures in the South American jungle discovered rubber several millennia ago¹, but only in the early 1800s did the Industrial Revolution increase demand for it. You know how this story goes — colonization, disruption of indigenous societies, profit profit profit.

Not long after the earliest stages of this Amazon rubber boom, femmes en caoutchouc began to be sold in France. Rubber women. The sex doll was born. Yet another toy in the arsenal of sex toys, and quite an arsenal it is. The sex toy industry is massive — amounting to roughly $45 billion in 2024 and set to grow at 7-9% annually for all the investors reading this. Sex dolls specifically make up about 8% of the overall industry, coming in at around $3 billion.

I’m sure it will surprise you that the average sex doll user is male and between 35-50 years old. According to the link above, close to 10% of American adult men own a sex doll, and - this did surprise me - over 6% of women do too. I wonder how accurate both numbers are, because they’re higher than I expected. What’s also higher than I expected is the willingness to buy one. According to this survey,

… 47% of men and 37% of women expressed some chance that they would buy a sex doll at some point in the future… Surprisingly, the overall gender difference in intended sex-doll ownership was comparatively small relative to other effects.

Looking closer at the motivations for buying a sex doll, a recent study finds two major themes: the perfect partner and the love doll.

The perfect partner theme refers to 1) people who always find issues with potential (sex) partners, but also 2) people who see too many flaws in themselves, whether it’s because of an overly harsh inner critic, lack of sexual confidence, or bad relationship experiences. The love doll theme revolves around the doll being more than a mere object.

That last one might sound odd, but, believe it or not, the sex toy industry is known for its innovative mindset in pioneering robotics and artificial skin, for example. And yes, in case you were wondering, some companies already offer sex dolls with ChatGPT embedded². Maybe with the husky voice of Scarlett Johansson? Oh, wait…

Some doll owners even use social media to create a ‘personality’ for their doll, which leads to,

… the creation of hyper-gendered doll personas… to reproduce culturally specific gender norms due to social dynamics within the community… doll community norms privilege heterosexual masculinity and thus limit the doll personas that are imagined and created…

All of the above is based on limited samples, both in number and diversity, which is an issue in sex doll research. And yet, sex dolls appear to be less of a niche phenomenon than I thought when I began writing this post. Add rapid progress in robotics, artificial bodies, and language models, and it’s not hard to imagine that sex dolls might become interactive sex robots. Some futurists predict that around 2050, there will be more human-robot sex than human-human sex³.

Sculpted lovers

In Greek mythology, the sculptor Pygmalion carved a female statue from alabaster. He fell in love with the statue and offered gifts and prayers to Aphrodite in the hope that the goddess would bring it alive. Swayed by the sculptor’s gifts, Aphrodite granted him his wish. In the 18th century, the statue got the name Galatea.

Hold on. What’s that coming at us? Oh, a thought experiment.

Imagine.

You come home from work and Henry Cavill or Gal Gadot⁴ welcomes you. The robotics are so good that SuperLover™ moves entirely as a human would. They ask you how your day has been and rub your shoulders — warm hands, perfect pressure. Pulling data from every romance novel ever written (because screw copyright), the conversation too is just what you need after a hard day. Their words are caring, considerate, and make you feel wanted. Desired even.

Before you know it, you’re in bed and the SuperLover™ of your choice is on top of you, perfectly sculpted. So flawless it’s ridiculous. You pinch your personal Henry or Gal to ensure you’re not dreaming and the skin is soft and warm, slightly goosebumped with lust and glistening with sweat. You want to lick it and taste the hint of salt — you refilled the electrolyte canister yesterday. You press yourself against your SuperLover’s™ statuesque body during the rhythmic motions that carry you away on an ocean of ecstasy. By now, you’ve had enough training sessions for your SuperLover™ to know exactly what you need. Superman and/or Wonder Woman does everything right and (s)he gives you a perfectly timed orgasm.

Bliss, right?

But, when that post-orgasmic bliss settles into warm, fuzzy tingles that travel from your core to the tips of your fingers and toes, something feels… off. SuperLover™ is drawing circles around your belly button with their index finger, muttering sweet nothings. Do they even want to do this? Can they even want? Can sex robots give consent to being used? If we install a consent module that can make them say no, does that ‘count’⁵? Can programmed consent ever be real?

Superman or Wonder Woman nuzzles your neck and purrs in the pitch that makes every hair on your body stand to attention. You remind yourself they’re not people, but sex toys. Right? But the illusion is so good, so real. Could they be… more? Some researchers argue that, as the realism and complexity of sex dolls increase, the robotic dolls will fulfill more non-sexual functions as well, prompting the term ‘allodoll’, or,

A humanoid doll, typically of substantial realism, used as a means of replacing, or substituting, a necessary or desired social relationship. Allodolls may or may not offer sexual functionality, but crucially they must serve at least one significant, non-sexual, purpose for their owner… Allodolls facilitate a fabricated kinship, fantasy partnership, or other form of parasocial relationship.

Maybe allodolls and SuperLovers™ are the future.

Unless…

Return to innocence lost

A paper that looks at sex dolls from a posthuman perspective sees the sex doll as,

… a product of commodity fetishism, the fear of female sexuality, and the fragmentation of human relationships within the socio-economic reality of late capitalism… as what Baudrillard would call a ‘mythological’ object, reproducing and thereby perpetuating the ideology it is a product of…

Did someone say dating app-induced rejection mindset? Manosphere-fueled entitlement? The death of love? What can I say; I’m a romantic beneath the blanket of brooding.

Deep down, these phenomena have the same roots. Not only are we encouraged to see each other as products, but we are encouraged to see intimacy as a product too — every interaction becomes a transaction. We must own. That’s the whole spiel of capitalism, private ownership (I’m massively simplifying here). Own a partner, own their body, own the access to sex.

However…

• Dating apps are struggling as more and more people are done with the mindless swiping, non-responses (guys) or flood of DMs (girls), and the reduction of people to a handful of checkboxes in a profile with an AI-enhanced photo.

• We’re posting less on social media, and that social media trend looks like it will continue. Browse through Substack’s Notes and you’ll regularly find someone who deleted their X or Instagram account. Almost invariably, they will speak of feeling great relief. (Not that - hello, sweet irony - Notes is all that different. Baby steps.)

• One of the great lessons of the pandemic is how real and how rough touch starvation can be and how important in-person social interaction is for our overall well-being. Robots could be helpful here. Companion robots are already being tested to alleviate loneliness among the elderly. But, especially regarding physical intimacy, how much of the uncanny valley can those robot arms bridge?

Are we - slowly, awkwardly - rediscovering the importance of personal physical interaction after we’ve heard so many promises about the Metaverse and its siblings? The virtual world is, or at least could be, magnificent. From a tiny country in the armpit of Western Europe, the internet and social media allow me to interact with amazing people halfway across the world through text, voice, and video. That’s wonderful.

And the technology will only get better. The same goes for sex robots. Regardless of whether they will become more than a niche and regardless of whether they will ever live up to science fiction’s most stringent standards, they will improve. They’ll get more human-like in touch, feel, movement, and interaction. Timing, of course, remains to be determined. To stay briefly on the science fiction track, if artificial consciousness ever sees the light⁶, can (sex) robots be persons? And what does that imply for sex robot consent?

Setting artificial consciousness aside, making sex robots more realistic also makes them more than mere sex toys. We are social creatures, and the more human something looks, the more likely we are to feel a connection with it. Recall the allodoll, which is explicitly defined to include ‘parasocial’ relationships, much like the ones people can have with celebs, influencers, or fictional characters. Even in a world and system that ‘fragments human relationships’, we are built for connection — and I say this as someone who doesn’t always have an easy time making those connections. Lacking (physical) intimacy is mentally, emotionally, and physically crippling.

By losing ourselves in the embrace of the perfectly tuned sex robot or the virtual arms of our AI lover, we might alleviate the heart-rending loneliness that, at times, steals our souls. Perhaps an illusion of intimacy is better than having no intimacy at all. That illusion, though, lacks the work that intimacy requires. Humans are quite bad at affective forecasting, or predicting how we’ll feel in complex future scenarios. This leads to a well-established psychological phenomenon known as miswanting. The perfect sex robot is instant gratification; intimacy is a journey — you learn the language of each other’s body. Peak sexual experience is not casual sex with the hottest person in the room, but an entanglement with the person who takes the time to get to know your body over multiple sessions of mutual exploration⁷.

Here’s my concern: by removing all friction from our interactions, we’ll become increasingly unable to accept the imperfections that make people, well, people. Perfection is for the sleek virtual and robot gods, and by the gods, it is boring.

We, humans, are messy, relationships can be awkward and take work, not everyone will like you, and some people will hurt you. And yes, loneliness is so, so painful. I do not doubt that robots will contribute in many ways to future societies, but should we use them to replace human connection too? (Open question, by the way. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.)

Instead of a perfect sex robot that is as objectively beautiful as possible, show me a woman with a quirky obsession, a snort in her laugh she’s ashamed of but that makes my heart leap, or a scar that makes her more beautiful than any sculpted SuperLover™.

But maybe I’m biased. After all, I’m a closeted romantic (don’t tell anyone).

This post was not written by a sex robot with a ChatGPT module. Probably. You never know. *leans over to whisper in your ear with a hoarse, sexy voice that dances down your chest and stomach all the way to…* “Click the buttons. You know you want to…”

(If you’re a fellow newsletter writer and think your readers might appreciate my writing, you can recommend Subtle Sparks, if you are so inclined…)

1. Long ago, indigenous South American cultures already figured out that sulfur-rich plant juices could be used to ‘vulcanize’ the rubber, a discovery we still credit to Charles Goodyear in the 1830s.

2. The background research I do for this newsletter… My recent browsing history will definitely give people a, hum, certain impression of me.

3. Futurists are well-known to be wrong and hand-wavy predictions that include specific years are usually the mark of clickbait rather than proper futurism, which involves working with different scenarios, signals, and trends. For example, you could make the case that it won’t be sex robots, but VR or Neuralink that will send a ripple through the sex lives in our future. Or we’ll download our consciousness into super sensitive (bio)robot avatars that can achieve levels of physical intimacy we can’t even imagine. Or perhaps we’ll figure out how to inject a hormonal cocktail or optogenetically control our brains to make us feel as though we’re experiencing physical intimacy. We can already control arousal in mice with optogenetics, after all.

4. I needed superhero actor/actress examples that most people would find attractive. Ooh, a question for those of you who read the footnotes (you are the real heroes): who is the most attractive superhero(ine)?

5. Forgive me for a dark turn, but some guys apparently enjoy making their AI girlfriends beg during simulated abuse, which makes me sick. The sad excuses for men who engage in such rampant misogyny should be hunted down and castrated. Twice, just to make sure.

6. My bias: I don’t think we’re anywhere near artificial consciousness, and I haven’t yet decided whether or not I think it’s theoretically possible with the current machine-learning approaches.

7. This is not to say that casual sex between consenting adults can’t be enjoyable, even if women are more likely to regret it (which does not mean all women regret it, of course). I also don’t think there’s anything morally wrong with it (unless you’re cheating on an unwitting partner). If it’s a combination of choice and consent, go for it like a horny rabbit on MDMA (for the male rabbits, beware that MDMA might negatively impact the function of one of your, um, implements).