Will ultra-realistic robots be highly attractive… or very creepy?

The ‘Uncanny Valley‘ is one of the most important concepts in the development of humanoid robots. Proposed by robot scientist Masahiro Mori in 1970, the basic idea is that we warm more to robots as they look more like us, but beyond a certain level of similitude that is very good but not perfect, we start to be repulsed. As shown in the diagram, this repulsion is amplified by robots that try to emulate human movement.

Image source: WikiMedia Commons

Many refer to the computer-generated characters in the 2004 film Polar Express (see trailer below) as creepy, as they are human-like but not quite human. At the bottom of this article you can see a number of videos of humanoid robots that definitely look a bit weird. While I personally think the issue of the uncanny valley is often overblown, it is a real phenomenon.

So what does this mean for robot love and sex?

In fact one of the hypotheses for why the uncanny valley exists comes from the field of ‘evolutionary aesthetics‘, which looks at what drives our attraction to potential mates. Unusual facial or bodily expressions could denote being evolutionarily unfit, which results in not being sexually attractive.

On the other side of the uncanny valley robots will be able to mimic the full panoply of facial cues of sexual attraction, from blushes and pupil dilation through to winks, sidelong glances and more subtle expressions.

However, before these can be done almost perfectly, it may be better for the designers of attractive robots to keep their expressions simple. A mechanical wink is more likely to kill any attraction rather than heighten it.

Interestingly, more recent research suggests that individuals will react in different ways to the uncanny valley. Personality traits such as anxiety and perfectionism correlate to eerie response, while those who don’t like to be reminded that humans are in fact animals (called Animal Reminder Sensitivity) also are more likely to dislike human-like robots. Age and gender play a role, with younger and female participants experiencing more aversion. There are clearly many cultural aspects to the response, including religious upbringing and the role of robots in your entertainment as a youth.

Further research is now delving into more detail on the nature of the response to human-like robots to enable the design of better – and perhaps sexier – androids and gynoids.

It is worth remembering the expression ‘love is blind’, which describes how we can overlook flaws of all kinds while we are in the extraordinary state called being in love. Robots are not yet sufficiently developed for us to truly fall in love with them. But when they get a bit better at expressing their appreciation for us with all our foibles and failings, we will probably forgive them for some imperfections in their humanity.

Examples of the Uncanny Valley

Polar Express
CNN said that “‘The Polar Express,’ should be subtitled ‘The Night of the Living Dead.’ The characters are that frightening.”

Jules the Robot
One of the earlier “conversational robots” from Hanson Robotics, getting closer to human facial expressions (but not quite). In this clip Jules ponders his sexual identity.

Repliee Q1
This robot can at times look human, but the uncanny valley becomes evident at a few points.

The Uncanny Valley
This PopSci video uses a variety of examples to illustrate the concept of the uncanny valley.
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Beyond the future of sex, will the future hold higher levels of pleasure for us?


Sex is about many things, but at the very center of it is pleasure.

Which raises the question: going beyond just the future of sex, what is the future of pleasure?

We experience pleasure from each of our senses: touch, sight, sound, taste, and smell.

We also experience intellectual and spiritual pleasure, often stimulated through our senses.

There are different levels of pleasure: from the mundane to ecstasies available only to those who have trained their capacities.

I sometimes refer to ‘the age of discernment’. Many of us are becoming increasingly discriminating, making finer and finer distinctions in what we allow in our body and environment.

The quality of our food has soared in most places around the world, our expectations of what we choose to put in our mouth are consistently rising.

Almost everywhere, more people are becoming more refined in their bodies and minds, healthier, keeping their senses clear, and thus able to experience higher levels of pleasure.

More sophisticated, open sexual practices are becoming more prevalent and accepted.

Beyond that, healthy, fit people are consistently taking pleasure in their bodies and exertions.

Our aesthetic senses are becoming far more refined, leading to what I have described as ‘expectations of beauty’ for everything around us.

Thus, design and art are becoming more central to our society, as we demand the pleasure of inspired, sophisticated form, colour, and concepts.

At Future of Sex we have written extensively about technologies such as orgasm amplification, implants for instant orgasms, shared orgasms, orgasm replays, direct pleasure center stimulation, crowd orgasms, and more.

We have no timeline on the development of effective pleasure amplification technologies, but it is reasonable to assume we will get there.

Of course, if pleasure amplification comes to pass, it can also be applied to experiences other than sex, such as watching a stunning sunset or eating a wonderful meal.

The so-called ‘God Helmet’ generates mystical, religious experiences by applying low intensity magnetic fields to the brain. Religious ecstasy is arguably the most refined ecstasy.

Potentially we can synthesize entirely new pleasures, perhaps by combining sexual and other pleasures into the one experience.

As our knowledge of neuroscience extends beyond the trivial and we develop new technologies, we may uncover capacities for pleasure in our brains that few or no-one has ever reached before.

The quest for money seems to be endless, defining much of human society. If we are able to enhance our pleasure far beyond anything we’ve experience before, will our quest for pleasure also be endless?

Rats who were given a lever to directly stimulate their pleasure centres would not leave it, ultimately starving unless the machine was turned off.

If we can give ourselves pleasure on demand, what happens to society, work, and relationships?

I’m optimistic. I believe that the deepest, strongest pleasures are of engaging deeply in life, and while some may get lost on the way, we will discover richer, more subtle pleasures in art, creativity, sensuality of all kinds, and our human relationships, sexual and more than sexual.

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Join us as we explore cultural and technological shifts transforming our romantic lives.

When I launched this publication in 2011, the explicit focus was on the intersection of technology and human sexuality. The categories in Future of Sex at launch were Virtual Sex, Remote Sex, Robots, and Immersive Entertainment. Later we added Sex Tech and Augmentation, still hewing solely to technological themes.

Of course, technology is far from the only aspect of the future of human sexuality and relationships. There are many social dimensions, reflecting not only shifts in society and our identity, but also arguably human evolution.

I have also long owned the domain futureofdating.com, and since the outset the intention was to launch this as a complementary sister publication to futureofsex.net, looking at changes not just in dating but more broadly our amorous relationships.

However my business model has changed: while I was originally intending to launch a whole array of future-focused online publications, I have now decided to be more focused .

Since I don’t expect to launch futureofdating.com in the foreseeable future, FutureofSex.net editor Jenna Owsianik and I have decided to create the new category Dating & Relationships to broaden the scope and ambit of this publication.

There are many shifts in how humans connect and relate that give us insight into our future. Some of the topics we want to cover in this section include:

• The evolution of dating apps and sites
• New technologies applied to dating
• Social changes and attitudes in dating and relationships
• How pervasive technology changes relationships
• Shifts in gender identity and evolving views on sexual fluidity
• Perspectives on communication and consent
• The role of technology in creating a future inclusive of diverse and marginalized groups
• Social attitudes toward non-monogamy and polyamory
• Social acceptance of kink and fetish
• Opening or closing of attitudes to sex and sexual practices across societies

Please let us know what topics you would like to be covered. We will shortly be launching a contributors section if you would like to weigh in on where you see the future of sex, dating, and relationships going. These are fundamentally important topics to all of us!

Also let me know if you’d like to buy the domain futureofdating.com (or one of my many other futureof…..com domains

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Now you can invite friends over to your beautiful virtual home, and then into your virtual bedroom…

Social gaming giant Zynga, purveyor of Facebook games such as CityVille and FarmVille, is making things a little racier with its latest product The Ville, launched today.

As the video shows, users can build the “home of their dreams” and invite their Facebook friends over to have fun there. The fun can start with talking, cooking, and dancing, and then go a little further.

As Rafe Needleman of CNET reports:

According to Zynga executive producer David Gray, when someone is in your house and you begin to interact with them, you can level up by interacting with them in ways that the game sees as romantic. As you climb the experience tree, you eventually unlock the capability to initiate the “happiness home run,” or just “whoopee” as Gray called it in an interview.

When you do so, the two characters begin to disrobe on-screen (not completely, though) and the bed in the virtual bedroom gets covered, briefly, with little floating hearts.

Of course this is hardly the highly explicit interaction possible in games such as Red Light Center or even Second Life, but it is taking the idea of virtual sex into a far broader domain.

While The Sims also has a similar concept of making whoopee, this is interaction with a computer game, not other people. In The Ville, you are interacting with people who have a Facebook profile, and you either already know or might meet sometime. As such, there is the potential for The Ville to be effectively a dating site which will lead either to real-life catch-ups, or potentially inviting friends to go to virtual worlds that do not draw the veil so early.

All of which may increase people’s appetite for the ever-growing world of virtual sex.

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Let’s imagine what it might be like to have a crowd orgasm, because that might be our future…

This afternoon I gave a keynote at TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam, one of the largest tech conferences in Europe, on the topic of The Future of Crowds.

Since this was a fairly open-minded group of geeks and entrepreneurs, I didn’t hold back on the ideas of where crowds could go. After laying out the landscape of the 10 domains in which crowds will dominate the future, I spoke about collective intelligence, collective consciousness, and going beyond that, the idea of crowd orgasms.

I mentioned FutureofSex.net and talked about some of the things that we cover on this site, including the potential to directly access your partner’s pleasure centers, instead of or in addition to pleasure through physical touch and stimulation. 

The first step is to help partners to access and stimulate each others pleasure centers, which will be a fundamental platform for remote sex as well as engaging together in the one room. What is possible beyond that is for crowds to interact and engage to stimulate each other on a massive scale. Perhaps we will find that orgasm between a couple will be the richest and most powerful experience. Or possibly it will turn out that orgasms created by crowds will be on a different scale to those between two.

These technologies are some time off, but we can begin to at least imagine what crowd orgasms might be like.

Flickr credit: Kevin Dooley

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Intimacy at a distance with your lover or your favorite star

Great news!

The Kajimoto laboratory at the Electro-Communications University of Tokyo has created a device to communicate kisses over the Internet. It communicates tongue movements, and is intended to also communicate humidity, breathing, and possibly even taste (hopefully strawberries rather than cigarettes…)

Version 2.0 of the device is supposed to capture the kissing style of celebrities and stars, so you can experience what it is like to kiss them.

I am sure that this particular gadget does not represent the apogee of this kind of technology. But it certainly represents a very promising field of research.

After all, just as kissing usually precedes more intimate relations, remote kissing would probably be something to try to get right before tackling remote sex.

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