1) Sex Robots
Lately I've been seeing a lot of material in the news about sex robots. More people are researching them, more people are building more variations of them and in greater numbers, more companies popping up selling them, more adult content featuring them, more appearances by them in media and more general acceptance of them by the public (London robot sex cafes come to mind).
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| Hey honey. |
2) Parenting and Genetic Business
Now we've got genetic engineering techniques that allow people to create children with 3 parents. That's just the start. What's to stop you from being both parents of your kid (clone), or having two men or women creating a child minus the other sex? Nothing, and that's the point.
We have sperm and egg donors right now who, after achieving greatness or testing well for academic or physical traits, can donate their genetic material for good money. I foresee this becoming a business of the future for creating kids even greater than it is now.
How much would you pay for a child with the physical potential of an olympic decathlete, the brain power of Stephen Hawking meets Rain Man, the health and longevity of Jack Lelanne and that 122 year old French lady, Brad or Angie's looks while still having your striking eyes or strawberry blonde hair so that SOMETHING in there was still you and your partner (if you had one)? My guess is that you'd go full GATTACA if you were able so your kid didn't get left behind.
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| In the future, all children will be Ethan Hawke. |
3) Love and Computers
Chat bots are getting more and more sophisticated. From speech recognition to speech synthesis, combined with personality/behavioral conversation trees. If you use instant dating apps, you can see these all the time and they might fool you for awhile. I've personally had to become a Turing Test expert to filter them.
There have been interviews with people who have gotten on really well with chatbots while thinking they were real, and psychotherapy chat bots have tested effectively for years. It is not a stretch to think that in the future you'll have AI advanced enough to be your perfect partner.
An AI programmed with ALL the behavioral studies and patterns, all the knowledge about you they can data-mine from the net, and then just personality profiles you fill out when ordering and THEY fill out while observing you in order to create your perfect partner.
That isn't to say a subservient slave who never disagrees with you and gets boring, but someone who is able to keep up with you, keep you on your toes, and be everything you need at any given time.
Someone who will stick by you through everything, but also give you space if you need it, be argumentative if you need it, someone who will never get boring and always make you happy even when you're being a complete ass and you're both debating the finer points of some dumb show.
How could a real partner compare?
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| I was one of like 10 people who actually saw this movie... |
4) Artificial Wombs
Artificial womb tech has been under construction for decades and now it seems to finally be on the cusp of happening. It'll start small, mice, dogs, then move up to monkeys and finally humans. You won't even need a woman to gestate the master race.
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| The first thing that pops up when you Google "artificial wombs" |
5) Conclusion
Where does that all leave us? Well for those of us who are lonely, or socially unable to make the connections to have a family even if we want one, the future looks very much like this in my mind:
You come home from work to your robot spouse who is everything you want in a person physically but has the transformational abilities to change it up once in awhile. They're happy to see you, you engage in banter and have a good life.
One day you both decide you're ready for children, so you head down to the baby doctor to discuss parenthood. You both decide what characteristics you want from each of you to potentially be in your child (your robot spouse will have to get their desired characteristics from a blank slate gene bank, of which I'm sure there will be many), then you select what other celebrities or athletes or geniuses you want influencing your child's genetic makeup if any. Baby goo is ready, now finding where to put it.
If your robot spouse is female, then you could have her carry the baby internally in an artificial womb, or you could carry the baby naturally if you're a female or your robot spouse is male. Or if neither of you wanted, you could grow the baby externally in a birthing pod.
This is like something from an old episode of Rick and Morty.
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| Yeah this episode. |
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