Artificial Intimacy, by Rob Brooks (introduction)

Introduction: In the beginning …

According to the Old Testament, sex and gender relations first grew complicated when Eve ate fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and then manipulated Adam into doing likewise. Their sin made apparent to them their nakedness, of which they were ashamed.

Through sexual desire and reproduction, Adam and Eve transmitted their sin to all their descendants, thus transforming human nature.

Greek mythology pinpoints a similar moment. The poet Hesiod tells us that the first woman, Pandora, brought with her to the world a jar containing ‘burdensome toil and sickness that brings death to men, … diseases … [and] a myriad other pains’.1 She promptly scattered all these contents, filling the earth and sea with evils.

Whichever account you read, sex became complicated very early in human history, women bore most of the blame, and knowledge made everything worse. As a scientist who studies the forces that render sex so complicated, I have nowhere near the canonical certainty of Hesiod, the Old Testament, or the fundamentalists who today use religious origin myths to set their moral compass. I do know, however, that knowledge presents a key to human improvement, that making women responsible for policing sexuality harms people of all genders, and that there is no point looking for answers in Genesis.

Sex was complicated from the very first time two single-celled organisms combined their DNA. It grew even more so by the time modern humans arose. Yet it reached new depths of complexity over the last 12 000 years or so, for reasons that have nothing to do with a 1

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mythic Tree of Knowledge. Human sexuality became complex because new technologies changed how women and men make their livings, and thus how they relate to one another. From taming animals and domesticating cereal crops to industrialisation and the contraceptive pill, technology repeatedly disrupted the ways in which people cooperated with, befriended and loved one another. And new technologies threaten to overshadow the myriad pains that escaped Pandora’s box.

As lifesized silicone-skinned sex dolls metamorphose into lifelike robots that can move, talk and, especially, fuck, many commentators fear they will change human relationships for the worse. That they may well do, but could a sex robot revolution have some upsides?

While we gawk at the sex robots, trying to process them in all their uncanny weirdness, other technologies based in artificial intelligence and virtual reality insinuate themselves into human interactions, quite likely with more profound effects. Collectively, these are the ‘Artificial Intimacies’: technologies that engage our human needs for connection, intimacy, and sexual satisfaction. Machines that can help us make and maintain friendships in a world of cognitive overload. Machines that can help us feel better. And machines built to feed back to us whatever it is that they need us to see, hear, or feel.

Many artificial intimacies will simply refine technologies that already exist, including social media and video games. Others will look entirely new. Together, they will likely transform the quality of human life. The coronavirus pandemic already accelerated the transition to artificial intimacy as people in isolation leaned more heavily on their digital tools to socialise, work, play, and sometimes get off. If you want to date the start of the age of artificial intimacy, then I would suggest 2020.

Human friends or lovers being made redundant by touching, feeling robots and virtual reality avatars will likely remain the realm of science fiction. Machines may never do intimacy as well as real humans do. They don’t have to. Social media already occupies some of the 2

Introduction: In the beginning …

limited time and headspace that people have available for social relations. Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok crowd family, friends and lovers into ever-smaller spaces in our lives. Likewise, the artificial intimacies of the near future will provide imperfect substitutes for companionship, friendship, enmity, rivalry, counsel, intimacy, sex and love.

As they have proved for social media, the results will present a mix of good and bad. Some technologies will meet urgent needs. Some may bestow salutary, even life-saving, effects. Other consequences will diminish individuals, and possibly even devastate communities. Whatever the blend of positive and negative effects, anything that changes human relations will generate ideological heat. The new technologies could unleash changes so extensive that the sexual revolution of the late twentieth century, and the culture wars that have reverberated ever since, come to look relatively trivial.

I am an evolutionary biologist who studies how sex and reproduction shape the lives of animals, including human animals. Early in my career I watched the world’s favourite aquarium fish – the guppy – for thousands of hours, learning how they court and mate. My collaborators and I captured crickets in a country graveyard at midnight and took them back to our lab to show that, when fed a high-quality diet, males use it as fuel for their relentless chirping to attract mates. They then burn out and die young. Sex really matters.

Our research at the UNSW Sydney Sex Lab, on mice, venomous red-back spiders, pond-skating water striders and many other species, reveals that sex has far-reaching consequences for non-human and human animals alike. While it might undersell humanity to suggest that we ‘ain’t nothing but mammals’, there remains a great deal about the human condition to be learned from watching the Discovery Channel.

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Artificial Intimacy is foremost about human nature, shaped as we domesticated one another from wild, forest-dwelling apes into more cooperative, friendly, intimate creatures. That same evolutionary process, however, has a dark side that enables exploitation, conflict and strife. Both the lighter and shadier aspects of human nature will influence the course as AI and other technologies blow humanity into waters never before sailed, much less charted.

This book doesn’t peer into distant decades, projecting technologies undreamed of by the average imagination. It does not concern itself with artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can do anything a human can, or fret about the coming singularity when AGI can design better AGI and technological progress explodes. Artificial Intimacy concerns the near future, from a vantage point firmly in the present. The technologies are only those we have right now, somewhat amplified by realistic expectations of faster computers, more sophisticated algorithms, and accumulating mountains of data, data, data. The job I offer to do, as your guide, is to extrapolate from the latest knowledge of human nature to consider how the new and emerging technologies will – or at least could – alter humanity’s future.

Those of us old enough to remember the nineties, but young enough to have welcomed the internet, will remember how the net was meant to make the world a better place by democratising information and communication. The internet delivered many wonderful things, including free access to almost all of human knowledge, instantaneous communication, and navigation tools that get us where we need to be with remarkably few arguments. We can share photographs with loved ones on the other side of the world, buy almost anything online, and

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Introduction: In the beginning …

entertain ourselves for an entire evening watching TikToks. Who could ask for more?

Generation Xers like me, who remember the frisson of the internet’s early promise, find ourselves a little flat nowadays. In addition to all the wonderful things that came bundled with the net, it also inflated thought bubbles full of fake news, democratised ignorance, and birthed armies of trolls. We know how technology can disappoint, even as it delivers.

If humans simply leave things to unfold on their own, without thought or discussion, then artificial intimacy will be captured by a few corporations and enslaved to serve their interests at the expense of the many users. The technologies that abet commerce and manipulation will win out, and those that serve a public good might not see the light of day. Artificial Intimacy offers a glimpse of what the distant evolutionary past, and the more recent technological–cultural past, can teach us about humanity, and how we might go about fashioning a better future.

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