Lifeboat Foundation

In the next half of this century, humans will be regularly engaging in sexual activity with robots, and maybe even falling in love with them, according to Helen Driscoll, a psychologist who specialises in sex and mate choices at the University of Sunderland in the UK.

Her comments came while discussing the technological advances that are making sex dolls more interactive than ever before, and they present a future eerily similar to that of the Joaquin Phoenix film Her, where the main character falls in love with an operating system on his computer (voiced by Scarlett Johansson no less, who could blame him?)

“As virtual reality becomes more realistic and immersive and is able to mimic and even improve on the experience of sex with a human partner; it is conceivable that some will choose this in preference to sex with a less than perfect human being,” Driscoll told David Watkinson from the Daily Mirror.

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After Facebook’s video strategy turned out to be a success, the social network giant’s CEO is now eager to completely revolutionize the way we communicate by mastering virtual reality technologies.

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Pitch accepted.

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“‘We are unsure if gamers and general consumers alike are willing to spend long periods of time alone, in a confined space, with a headset, and completely shut off from surrounding environment,’ [Oppenheimer analysts] wrote of the limiting characteristics. This brings us to the social issue: virtual reality has so far only been a single person experience.” Read more

Immersive virtual reality is the vision of a computer-generated reality that looks, sounds, smells and feels so authentic that it psychologically tricks our brain into accepting that it is real.

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Virtual-reality Rehabilitation Gaming System (credit: Belén Rubio Ballester)

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Vannevar Bush’s prediction, half a century later, rings true: “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.”

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International Business Times out with a story on VR and transhumanism:

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“Most of the VR prototypes we’ve seen so far use a wraparound headset. But this “shut out everything” hardware paradigm could seriously limit adoption, especially in consumer markets. There’s actually an emerging category of virtual experiences that allow a user to experience digital objects as if they were real, without the need for a wraparound headset. There hasn’t been as much chatter about it, but “non-enveloping” VR could be one of the biggest, most important parts of this new wave of digital-analog world interfaces.”

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