Looking at the curve sketched by the theoretical framework of Moore’s law, one could derive a plethora of conclusions. Some would be academic. Platitudes, at worst. But should our observer happen to be a particularly boorish individual, they might be intrigued by this curve – and yet speechless. Unable, maybe, to verbalize their astonishment about how technology is shaping people’s lives. We might picture them, after one too many glasses of Bourbon, blabbering something along the lines of: “Man! The world sure has had a hard-on for tech, lately”. “Lately” being “the last 70 years”, of course. The fact of the matter is: our bumpkin might not be wrong. Not horribly so, at least. The curve’s mighty steepness pointing to the heavens, it does kind of resemble just that: a human erection. … Too risqué a comparison, right? Now, now. Bear it with us. Not only would the “curve-erection” analogy make anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss proud – again, bear it with us! – the comparison is valid in at least some regards. Let’s put it like this: is it fair to say that we are all very, very excited about technology? Absolutely. Moore’s curve is first and foremost a symbol of investment in innovation. Hype. Undiluted excitement. Humanity has been doubling on its transistors capacity with an exponential growth for many years by now. Every two years, in fact. This means CPUs get more and more processing power (although this trend might stop soon), our graphics cards render images more and more stunningly (even if we cannot perceive it on screen), and your friend who moonlights as a taxi driver could be jobless (in a few years, duh). In futurist Ray Kurzweil’s own formulation, we are consistently “doubling the paradigm-shift rate every decade”. Assuming these projections will hold true, the curve is accelerating to new heights: to even more tantalizing possibilities, made possible by the luminaries of information theory. Let’s take a second to thank mavericks like John McCarthy, Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Rodney Brooks. Boosts in computational power aside, humanity’s basic needs and necessities have mostly been static for millennia. Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s idea is that the internet – the biggest hub of information on the planet, readily available at our disposal – reflects “the good, bad and the ugly” of society. Many people, in turn, agree the internet is (mostly) for porn. Just what’s the takeaway, here? Moving on. If we assume the internet’s marriage with porn is happy indeed, what happens when we are beyond the internet as we knew it in the early 90s and 00s? In an environment some daring intellectuals defined as “a cognitive-cultural economy”? A fairyland, in which the means of production – operation-wise, as well as strategy-wise – for the satisfaction of necessities are in the hands of artificial intelligence? What will this new means try to satisfy? The same old needs, right? By now, the message should hopefully be a bit clearer. Let’s address the elephant in the room, then: this will be a blog about love. And technology. For the most part, about how the first is influenced by the second (no computer felt love nor loved… at least as of yet). Love and sex going hand in hand, we might propose interesting tidbits of information, involving some of our… basest instincts from time to time. In even simpler terms, we are not “tech for society”, not “tech for your business”, nor “tech to mow your lawn”. “Tech for sex“, it is. Nothing more, nothing less, everything in-between the two worlds. We are not going for cheap pops, though. Sex sells, and usually well, but the controversy that has piqued our interest is something reasonably specific. Legitimate, even. Academic, almost. We have sexuality bonding with new, pervasive technologies. Does this array of emerging technologies mesh well with our ideals as a human race – think a grandiose “making us advance as a species” – long before Kurtzweil’s infamous singularity takes place? Yes, or no? What happens when a machine could bring you closer to satisfaction of your desires through virtual fulfilment – think about VR, and its applications in the porn industry? Or satisfy your cravings with physical stimuli, period, from Japan’s infamous – and nowadays close to obsolescence – dakimakura to China’s WMDolls? Let’s be honest, here. Folks are already marrying regular dolls: just imagine loading up a kernel in that. What about businesses that have economical stakes in this? What’s in it, for them? Let’s think of NaughtyAmerica.com, experimenting with VR to raise the number to subscriptions; or Pornhub: eagerly thanking the advancements in our techniques for raking in big data to improve your feed. And keep advertisers happy. … Last but not least, what about the commonfolk? Should we be talking about “cutting edge” or “bleeding edge”? Should we fear the change, or welcome these outlets? Or, perhaps, might we risk becoming something slightly less than human, dreaming about electric sheep more than we do biological ones? And God, oh, God… will anyone think of the children? REFERENCES: https://www.deviantart.com/daigospencer/art/Walfas-parody-Kraftwerk-We-are-The-robots-627886932 If you’re interested in a more precise definition of Moore’s law: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mooreslaw.asp Regarding the impact of IT for the world, we suggest Andrew McAfee’s comments in his “The Second Machine Age”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bPrmoOn8ng Apparently. https://interestingengineering.com/no-more-transistors-the-end-of-moores-law Human eyes have their fair share of limitations, calculated with Rayleigh formula. See the case with the bottlenecks of 8K television: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinmurnane/2018/10/28/dont-be-fooled-8k-tvs-are-a-waste-of-money-for-most-viewershttps://www.wired.com/story/when-will-self-driving-cars-readyhttps://www.internethalloffame.org/blog/2018/01/02/tim-berners-lee-future-web For the Avenue Q musical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs; For ridigly statistical, musicless evidence:https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201611/dueling-statistics-how-much-the-internet-is-porn http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199549306.001.0001/acprof-9780199549306-chapter-4 https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/us-woman-marries-zombie-doll-in-intimate-ceremony-says-they-want-to-have-kids-now-2037951.html
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