Will we soon be able to buy his synthetic companions wholesale?

As far as franchises go, Blade Runner is remarkably diverse. From video games to authorized follow-up novels, comic books to clothing, and even toys, it has become a huge part of popular culture

At its core, though, there are just three key works behind it all: the original novel by Philip K. Dick, its 1982 movie adaption, and Denis Villeneuve’s follow up film.

The novel that started it all

And now, in 2017—only two years away from the original film’s timeline of 2019—we’re seeing that Blade Runner isn’t just entertainment but a possible glimpse into the future of human sexuality.

Written in 1968, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is considered by many to be a fine, if not brilliant, story of a science-fiction master at the height of his powers. The book takes place in a near future devastated by nuclear war, where animal life is nearly extinct—save for those owned by the wealthy. Everyone else, meanwhile, has to make do with robotic creatures designed to look and act exactly like the real thing.

Trying to preserve humanity, the government encourages people to emigrate off-world to Mars. To entice Earth residents to make they move they are promised a personal replicant: an android servant that, like the animals, is practically indistinguishable from organic beings.

Our protagonist is Rick Deckard, who accepts an assignment to hunt down six rogue replicants who have returned to Earth from Mars—all so he can afford to purchase an actual, biological pet.

A new life awaits you

If this is starting sound familiar it’s because Ridley’s Scott’s 1982 film, retitled Blade Runner, does have a lot in common with the original novel by Dick. Yet while the two also have many differences, their core plot is the same: Deckard pursues rogue replicants, and in the course of doing so, deals with questions of identity, memory, and what it means to be human.

In Electric Sheep, Dick plays with one of his favorite themes: androids so realistic they can pass for human beings. In both the novel and in Scott’s film adaptation, replicants are so lifelike the only way to tell them apart from people is by using a sophisticated test that measures their reaction to emotional stimuli. (Trivia time: the questions that Deckard asks in the 1982 film are almost identical to the ones Dick uses in his original novel.)

While we may be a century or more away from being able to create anything close to a replicant, there are researchers working on giving artificial intelligence something akin to emotion.

Robots that love

As we have already reported, National Taipei University Assistant Professor Hooman Samani has been studying what he calls lovotics: the way human beings develop emotional attachments to technology. Using devices like his Mini-Surrogate, he may be on the path to making it easier to us to desire robots—and for them to have feelings for us in return.

Part of this erotic connection would require ways for robots to accurately read our emotions, which would, in turn, enable our android lovers to perfect their sexual skills thanks to loads of stored data on past encounters.

Robots that can read us

This is far from far-fetched, in fact, we’ve already seen steps in this direction like how a team from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT released its work on EQ-Radio: a system that uses WiFi to read a subject’s emotional state.

Right now it’s still pretty basic but give it a few more years and technology like this will be able to read not just your emotional state but maybe even your unconscious thoughts.  As mentioned, more data means a much more perfect android lover.

Coincidentally, we recently explored the idea of artificial intelligence as  lover in Blade Runner 2049, based on the relationship between the new Blade Runner, K (played by Ryan Gosling), and his hologram girlfriend (played Ana de Armas).

But what if you want to alter emotions, not simply have them read, perhaps as yet another way for your replicant to sexually arouse you?

The Penfield mood organ

It’s interesting that with all the iterations of Blade Runner, from comic books to toys, so few have noticed a bit of technological foresight on Dick’s part—the one that could have as much as an impact on sex as replicants.

In Electric Sheep there is something called a Penfield mood organ, a technology that Dick has used in quite a few of his books. The basic idea behind it is it is a machine that allows users to choose their emotional states. The apparatus is a way to dispel boredom and (wait for it) increase sexual desire.

It’s also an invention that’s closer than you think. Liminal VR, headed by Damian Moratti, is working on creating a device similar to Dick’s Penfield mood organ: a VR-based system that works to “combine neuroscience and design principles in virtual reality to induce a range of cognitive and emotional states, affording you the ability to control and augment your state of mind.”

We’re not sure how far Liminal VR has gone with its development but the science is certainly sound. Researchers have already established that emotions can be changed using either invasive techniques, such as with electrodes or through non-invasive means using electromagnetism.

There is even the possibility that we may be able to affect both emotion and memory, a key plot device in Electric Sheep, Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner, and even Denis Villeneuve’s sequel Blade Runner 2049.

More human than human

Putting these pieces together, it’s not hard to picture a near future where we will have android lovers that have been created to be sexually pleasurable. They may even display something very similar to human emotional reactions.

They’d know us perhaps even better than we know ourselves, being able to read our arousal and so meet our erotic needs before we can even voice them. And, if you’d like, you’ll also be able to adjust your own sexual arousal level: fine-tuning your excitement as much or as little as you want.

What this all means is what while replicants might be some years off, it looks very much like other elements in both the films as well as the original novel may arrive sooner than you think.

We can only hope that when they do, they’ll be part of a world that’s not as bleak and dystrophic as Blade Runner—in all its many forms.

Image sources: IMDB

The post Philip K. Dick’s Erotically Electric Dreams: Today’s Reality? appeared first on Future of Sex.

Pleasure pills, orgasmatrons, replicants, and more could be right around the corner

Spaceships, aliens, robots—we all love a good science fiction film. But aside from a few lucky guesses on the filmmakers’ parts, we rarely think of them as being truly prophetic.

Especially when it comes to their depictions of futuristic sex.

However, with new developments in pharmacology, virtual reality, robotics, telepresence, and artificial intelligence, more than a few classic, and sort of classic,science-fiction films are getting very close to erotic reality.

Here is a subjective look at five science-fiction films where their depictions of futuristic sex are fast-becoming less cinematic fantasy and more everyday sexual reality.

Sex pills from Barbarella (1968)

Barbarella: “Make love? But no one’s done that for hundreds of centuries!”

Featuring Jane Fonda’s zero-gravity striptease and life-threatening pleasure machine, Roger Vadim’s romp has become the benchmark of erotic science-fiction films. Based on the French comic by Jean-Claude Forest, Barbarella is pretty tame by modern standards, but when it was released in 1968 it raised more than a few eyebrows.

As part of the erotic phantasmagoria was the concept of sex pills. The explanation being given that Earth had evolved far beyond simple… well, physical love.

Yet we are possibly no more than a few years away from an actual, practical orgasm drug. Pharmaceutical researchers have already stumbled across medications like Anafranil, an anti-depressant that has the rather odd side effect of giving users orgasms when they yawn.
More than likely, many drug companies are working on turning that reaction into an actual pleasure-inducing little pill.

What will happen to human society when sexual pleasure no longer has to be physically derived is anyone’s guess. But if Barbarella is any indication, there will always be human beings more than willing to do it “the old-fashioned way.”

2. Virtual Sex from Demolition Man (1993)

John Spartan: “Look, Huxley, why don’t we just do it the old-fashioned way?”
Lenina Huxley: “Eeewww, disgusting! You mean … fluid transfer?”

Falsely imprisoned in a cryogenic prison, John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone) is defrosted into a ridiculously passive future to deal with another previous century throwback, one dangerously bonkers Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes) in Demolition Man.

In this film directed by John Flynn, Spartan doesn’t just have to catch Phoenix, but he has to deal with a world where good old messy sex has been replaced by a form of virtual reality.

Virtual reality, when the film was made back in 1993, was pretty much just speculation. But we now have products like Apple’s Vision Pro and the Meta Quest 2 and many others.

Many developers are already rushing to create erotic virtual reality systems, where users will be able to don a pair of optical goggles and immerse themselves solo or with others—in a practically infinite world of erotic pleasure.

Let’s just hope that when virtual reality sex becomes mainstream, we won’t have to deal with the three seashells that perplexed John Spartan (see the movie to get the joke).

3. The Orgasmatron from Sleeper (1973)

Miles Monroe: “Perform sex? Uh, uh, I don’t think I’m up to a performance, but I’ll rehearse with you if you like.”
Luna Schlosser: “Okay. I just thought you might want to; they have a machine here.”
Miles Monroe: “Machine? I’m not getting into that thing. I, I’m strictly a hand operator; you know, I, I… I don’t like anything with moving parts that are not my own.

Woody Allen’s 1973 movie Sleeper is only a laugh fest, but it’s also a pretty solid piece of science-fiction cinema.

Thawed out from cryogenic suspension, New York health food store owner Miles Monroe is thrust into a future where robot servants are commonplace, a healthy diet has been discovered to be steak and hot fudge sundaes, a despotic president rules everyone, and sex is enjoyed via an apparently mechanical “orgasmatron” booth.

While little detail is shown about the operations of the booth beyond that couples enter and leave… satisfied.

Woody’s adverse initial reaction to the device is pre 21st century—though his obvious pleasure after a solo interaction is more than evident. Preference to “hand operation” aside, we are actually on the verge of  our own version of the orgasmatron.

Arguably, the basic idea has been around since 1734 when the French invented the hand-operated Tremoussoir (and a steam-powered version appeared in 1869). These days we call them vibrators.

But even this basic technology is undergoing tremendous transformations. Modern sex toys are often Bluetooth enabled, programmable, interactive, and almost infinitely flexible. No matter your sexual itch, more than a few of them can scratch it.

Very soon, though, we’ll see haptic sex toys mated with virtual reality to create truly immersive and physical sexual experiences with holograms. In fact, we are already seeing a form of this.

This technology will mean that in your VR sexual paradise, when you reach out to touch someone you will really, actually be able to feel the contact. Then, in a few more years, we might see actual electric stimulation of the brain to induce orgasm.

Soon we will erotically, and literally, agree with Miles Monroe: “My brain? It’s my second favorite organ!”

4. Surrogate sex from Surrogates (2009)

Female Counsel: “Agent Greer, we’re not doctors.”
Tom Greer: “Honey, I don’t know what you are. I mean, for all I know, you could be some big, fat dude sitting in his stim chair.”

While justifiably not ranked among the great science-fiction films, Jonathan Mostow’s 2009 movie Surrogates (based on Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele’s graphic novel) does feature a unique depiction of future sex tech.

In this world of the near future, most of humanity spend their days in isolation, preferring to deal with the outside world and each other via the titular “surrogates:” sophisticated robotic puppets that can look like anyone and do things that no regular human being can do.

And, yes, even sexual things.

Alas, the film is pure preach and never really gets into the real sexual potential of the technology, preferring to use the usual burnt out cop (Bruce Willis) up against a convoluted conspiracy. Yawn!

RECOMMENDED READ: In the Year 2125: When Your Sexual Possibilities Will Be Practically Limitless

While we may be a few years away from lifelike robotic surrogates, we already have some intriguing early prototypes running around. Videophones, Facetime, and other examples of the tech are pretty much commonplace, allowing friends, family, and business associates to be projected onto phones, homes, or conference rooms.

All that was lacking has been mobility: the ability for users to actually interact with the person on the other side of their video call.

But now, through companies like Anybots, iRobot, MantaRobot, and many others, people thousands of miles away can physically work via robots with pretty much anyone, anywhere. Commonly referred to as telepresence, it’s already being used by doctors, teachers, and many others.

As with all technology, it no doubt will only be a few more years before sex will mix with telepresence. We can only hope that when that happens we’ll deal with it better than this very average film.

5. Replicants from Blade Runner (1982)

Tyrell: “More human than human is our motto.”

Concluding our tour of science-fiction films that are quickly becoming sexual fact is a true classic of the genre. Smoky, dour, noir, bleak, and totally mesmerizing, Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner explores the impact of replicants, artificial humans so indistinguishable from the flesh-and-blood variety they can only be detected by trained specialists.

And, when they invariably go rogue, they get hunted down by blade runners.

Based on the classic science-fiction novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner asks one key question: what is human? When Deckard (Harrison Ford) is tasked to track down and “retire” a group of replicants, he faces serious moral quandaries about them as well as himself, especially when he falls in love with one.

While we are quite far away from actually creating a totally convincing artificial human, we have begun to make some incredible baby-steps, including in a moment of irony that almost seems like the beginning of another science-fiction film, Hanson Robotics created a simulacrum of Philip K. Dick himself which went missing a few years ago.

So microwave some popcorn, make yourself comfy on the couch, and fire up some of these cinematic explorations of the world of tomorrow. But keep in mind that as you do, their fanciful looks at the future of sex are closer than you think.

Image sources: IMDB

The post Erotic Science Fiction Cinematic Technologies That May Soon Be Sextech Reality appeared first on Future of Sex.

No one should have to be made “better” in order to be accepted and desired

On the receiving end of media age discrimination, fitness guru Elisabeth Sparkle (brilliantly portrayed by Demi Moore) is devilishly tempted by The Substance, which will ultimately prove to be a literally bleeding-edge, illicit treatment promising to spawn a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” variant of herself.

Needless to say, it all goes grotesquely and disturbingly awry, culminating in a guts, flesh, and bloody body-horror jamboree of epically disgusting proportions.  

Succeeding as a daring, dark social commentary or not, The Substance puts forward an engrossing idea: would interacting with a different version of yourself be, as the film suggests, horrific or rather nurturing, self-affirming, and sexually enlightening?

“Pretty girls should always smile!”

Produced, directed, and written by Coralie Fargeat and co-starring Margaret Qualley as Sue, Elisabeth Sparkle’s perfect alter ego with Dennis Quaid in an over-and-over-and-over the top portrayal as their toxic television producer.

The Substance has garnered mostly positive reviews with a few, such as El País’ Javier Ocaña comparing it unfavorably to the thematically similar, more highly regarded John Frankenheimer film, Seconds.

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While the latter employed extensive plastic surgery to transform the tired, stodgy John Randolph into Rock Hudson, his idealized self, The Substance takes a less grounded, more Cronenbergian approach with Sue physically emerging from Sparkle’s body and must exchange places once a week or … well, things could and do get messy.

The core message of both is to love and accept oneself, which comes too late in Seconds and not at all in The Substance.

Dancing with yourself

What if we could someday develop a more emotionally fulfilling, even sexually liberating way for people to come face to face with who they truly are, not who they think they should be?

How we might pull this off is less important than what we’d possibly take away from the experience. That said, AI-enhanced virtual or augmented reality could provide an effective option, especially since it wouldn’t be necessary to actually construct or manufacture another but merely study and then approximate your personality.

RECOMMENDED READ: A Touching Tomorrow: Why Future Relationships Will Be More, Not Less Intimate

Branching off from there, interacting with a virtual counterpart might be therapeutic in coping with low self-esteem issues, being able not just to examine and appreciate your body but open up to someone who knows you as well as you know yourself.

The same may be true for sexual exploration, including making adjustments to one of your copies, such as its memory and physical parameters, to alter its gender expression and, from there, provide an exciting new sexual world to discover.

If you’re thinking we’re treading into creepy territory, keep in mind it’s basically masturbation with a few extra steps, something that has never been physically or emotionally unhealthy.

As this Men’s Health article puts it, “In addition to feeling ridiculously pleasurable, masturbation also has several health benefits, from lowering your risk for certain diseases to boosting your satisfaction during sex with a partner.”

You and me—

Have you ever wanted to do something but, for whatever reason, don’t have the time or are overly concerned about the bad things that might happen?  

With another self to play with, why not send it out in the world as your proxy, which, as it’s a version of you could report on whether it had a good or not-so-good time?

Looking further ahead, we might reach a time when you and your copy—or a whole multitude of slightly or significantly modified copies, plural—wouldn’t need to talk but would merge their memories.

Imagine the new insights you’d gain and how much you might learn about who you are.  It’d be like test-driving different versions of yourself, comparing what life is like for younger or older, the taller or shorter, the vulva or penis-equipped, the straight or gay versions of you.

—and we are all together

My biggest problem with The Substance is its needless cynicism, dodging what could’ve been a poignant moment of self-love for nothing but gore for gore’s sake hollowness.  At least in Seconds, the protagonist is granted a fleeting moment of emotional clarity.

Worse, The Substance mocks what’s perhaps the most emotionally uplifting and healing crucial thing anyone can do: to look into themselves and see not flaws or imperfections but a person worthy and deserving of love.

Image Sources: Depositphotos, IMDB 

The post “The Substance” and the Importance of Self-Love—and Pleasure appeared first on Future of Sex.

Sexually intriguing sci-fi from when “cyber” was cool

Though popular and widely respected, particularly among fans who appreciate their frequently disturbing erotic imagery, directors like David and Brandon Cronenberg aren’t the only filmmakers who’ve dared point their cinematic imaginations towards an exciting view of what life—and sex—might be like in the years ahead.

Since many of the following movies were released nearly twenty years ago, their future is closer to today than tomorrow.  Even so they’re entertaining and even offer up a bevy of quite frequently fascinating, sexually speculative ideas. 

XChange (2000)

Its budget may have been small, but when it comes to fast-forwarding the imagination, few films can match XChange. For starters, it revolves around an up-and-coming technology that enables person A to switch minds, even over long distances, with person B.  

Think telepresence, but instead of inhabiting a robot, you’d instead take someone else’s body for a spin.  The plot twists when Toffler (played by Kim Coates) swaps with Kyle MacLachlan’s criminally nasty Fisk.  On the run from the cops, Toffler resorts to hiding his consciousness in a mass-produced synthetic (Stephen Baldwin) with a built-in 24-hour lifespan.

While not perhaps not Oscar-worthy, XChange’s plethora of cyberdelic details and erotically enthralling possibilities is surprisingly enthralling and well worth hunting down.  

Gene Generation (2007)

As icky as it is sexually provocative, Gene Generation goes where science fiction movies rarely venture, showing what happens to people and the society they inhabit when we can reshape our bodies however and whenever anyone desires.

RECOMMENDED READ: Science Fiction Novels That Helped Us Explore Exciting New Sexual Territories

Starring the striking Bai Ling as an professional assassin trying to protect her brother (Parry Shen) from ruthless DNA Hackers, Gene Generation’s overall aesthetic tends toward the slick, wet, and generally disgusting while managing—largely due to Bai Ling’s performance— to be erotically enchanting.  

On the subject of genetic engineering, we’ve also speculated about everything from grown, not made sextech playthings to sexually super changing our bodies.

Avatar (2004)

Sharing a title and nothing else with James Cameron’s films, Avatar—also sometimes known as Cyber Wars or Matrix Hunter—is one of those unexpected treasures, like XChange, that understands you don’t need tens of millions of dollars to tell an intriguing-futuristic, sexually-enthralling story.

Dash MacKenzie (Genevieve O’Reilly), a classic forced-out-of retirement bounty hunter who ends up a mega-corporation’s crosshairs.

Virtual reality is another favorite topic of ours, which makes Avatar such a welcome addition to our list as rather than focusing on clunky hardware, it instead gives us a world where slipping in and out of cyberspace is as easy as stepping from one room to another.

Plus, it gets a special kudo for sensitively showing how our physical selves don’t need to mirror our digital avatars—and how this could be emotionally and sexually liberating for people with physical limitations.

Strange Days (1995)

On the subject of Cameron, his two-time Academy Award-winning ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow helmed our next entry, a chaotically sprawling whodunnit set during the last riotous days of 1999.

The speculative sextech side of Strange Days revolves around an illicit memory recording device, to which ex-vice cop Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) has become hopelessly addicted, endlessly replaying when he and Faith (Juliette Lewis) were together.

Thematically akin to Douglas Trumbull’s equally excellent 1983 Brainstorm, Strange Days doesn’t shy away from the good and potentially not-so-good sides of this sort of technology—each raising the possibility of user addiction: emotional, sexual, or both.

That said, the idea of sharing memories and experiences is the stuff erotic dreams are made of.  It’s just unfortunate Strange Days, aside from an extremely brief scene, doesn’t take time to explore how this technology might positively affect the future of human sexuality.  Hopefully, other filmmakers will someday pick up the flag from Bigelow and Trumbull and take it into a more optimistic direction.

Tomorrow’s sexuality—yesterday!

Big-budget cinema experiences certainly have their place, but remember, as with any other medium, there are unexpectedly arousing erotic speculative future treasures out there waiting to be discovered and enjoyed.  

If you have some you’re particularly excited by but may have slipped our attention, please feel free to share their titles in the comments! 

Image Sources: Depositphotos, IMDB

The post Looking Forward—From the Past: Retro Futuresex Flicks Worth Checking Out appeared first on Future of Sex.