The Covid pandemic made us all aware of just how crucial human contact is to our physical and psychological well-being. Now this awareness and advances in Artificial Intelligence have teamed up to provide us with a futuristic alternative to the human relationship: “digisexuality”.
The basic definition of “Digisexuality” doesn’t sound very out of the ordinary: “just anytime you’re using technology in sex or relationships, whether it’s through Snapchat or Skype, or meeting people online through Tinder or Bumble. Everybody’s more or less a digisexual in this first wave sense” said Neil McArthur, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Manitoba, and co-author of “The Rise of Digisexuality.”
Another definition is more striking: “a digisexual is someone who’s primarily attracted to sexbots rather than people, which can include sex robots, but also more broadly includes any technologically-assisted sexuality.”
According to Professor McArthur, “What distinguishes ‘digisexuals’ as a sexual identity is that they find their connection to their technology to be very close to those sorts of connections that we would make with human partners.” Some of these people have a dislike or even an aversion, to human flesh and find a suitable alternative through technology.
There are those who take the idea to extremes. In November 2019, Akihiko Kondo, a 35-year-old Japanese man made headlines for marrying a hologram, and in 2017, an AI engineer in China married a robot, (not legally).
Akihiko Kondo’s bride was a songstress with aquamarine twin tails named Hatsune Miku, who is not only a world-famous recording artist who fills up arenas throughout Japan, she is also the hologram that he lusted after. Mr. Kondo, who had been in love with Miku for more than a decade, insists the wedding was not a stunt, but a triumph of true love after years of feeling ostracized by real-life women for being an anime otaku, or geek. His parents skipped the wedding ceremony.
In an article in The _Byte, the author asked the provocative question: “’Digisexuals’ Are Falling In Love With — And Lusting For — Robots: Is Being Attracted To Robots A New Sexual Orientation?” Lest there be a misunderstanding, let me clarify that we’re not talking only about a romanticized concept of a relationship that can only remain fundamentally intellectual, we’re also talking about the sex act.
“What they’ve been into is sex tech, toys they can control with their tech devices, that attach to their penis or their vulva,” said Markie Twist, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout and co-author of a paper, in an interview with the Times.“They haven’t had contact with humans, and really don’t have any interest in sex with people. This is what they want to be doing, and if they could afford a sex robot, they would.”
Alex Williams made the observation that, “We live in an era when rapid advances in robotics and artificial intelligence are colliding with an expanding conception of sexual identity.” He points out that categories of sexuality are expanding all the time: “polyamorous or demisexual — that last one is people who only feel sexual attraction in close emotional relationships… aromantic (that’s people who don’t feel romance) or skoliosexual (that’s a primary attraction to people of no, or multiple, or complex genders)….” So, why not “digisexual” among them?
The takeaway for those of us who have come to think of technology as being inseparable from our lives, in a culture permeated with online pornography, sexting and Tinder swiping, is, have we all become closet digisexuals? Has the age-old lure of flesh and blood relationships become superfluous?
