Sex work in utopia
Artificial intelligence has the capacity to disrupt even the world's oldest profession. Ray Kurzweil has envisioned a future free of rape, disease, and criminalization. So what's the catch?
The second I got my hands on Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Nearer, I knew what I had to do. I ripped open the box, flipped to the index, and started searching for “sex”.
I hoped to find more of the futurist’s outlandish takes on the future of porn, pleasure, and reproduction. I was curious to see how his predictions had evolved since the publication of his 2005 best-seller, The Singularity is Near. As I reported earlier, Kurzweil had some pretty disturbing ideas about consent in virtual worlds at the time. Among other things, he envisioned technologies that would allow the user to undress anyone, anytime, without their consent and have sex with facsimiles of their favorite stars. He basically predicted real-time deep fake porn.
“You will be able to change the physical appearance and other characteristics of yourself and your partner. You can make your lover look and feel like your favorite star without your partner’s permission or knowledge. Of course, be aware that your partner may be doing the same to you.”
Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines
Where his previous books indulged in misogynistic fantasies and projections around mostly male pleasure, “The Singularity is Nearer” takes a much stiffer approach. Mentions of sex are limited to a breakdown of the statistical unlikeliness of any individual child birth (turns out you’re one in a googolplex); a rare acknowledgement of sexual reproduction’s advantages (genetic variation got us through the plague); an aside about the economic domino effect of self-driving vehicle adoption (the days of truck stop tricking may be numbered); and a mention of the unmeasurable labor force in underground economies (what happens on dark web, stays on dark web).
Gone are Kurzweil’s wild and problematic fantasy scenes; in their place, dry statistical reasoning. I’d hoped to see him expand on the limitless possibilities of sex in the singularity, and perhaps, speak to the evolution of his thinking around consent in virtual worlds, but his visions have been sanitized.
Kurzweil’s latest book did drop one crumb about the future of sex that piqued my interest, though. After explaining how self-driving semis pose a threat to truckstop economies, he goes into detail about how (and how quickly) technology might affect a series of different industries. He references a 2013 paper, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerization?” Its authors, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, ranked 702 professions on their likelihood of succumbing to automation by the early 2030s. Kurzweil points out that more than half of those occupations had a greater than 50 percent chance of obsolescence.
“High on the list were factory jobs, customer service, banking jobs, and of course driving cars, trucks, and buses. Low on that list were jobs that require close, flexible personal interaction, such as occupational therapists, social workers, and sex workers,” Kurzweil writes.
“The Future of Employment” doesn’t explicitly refer to sex workers – Kurzweil must be drawing his own conclusions here – but what he seems to infer is that our need for physical intimacy could make sex work future proof.
They aren’t concerned with losing market share to sex robots. They’re focused on making a living in a hostile world made worse by big tech.
Kurzweil has long predicted a rosy outcome for sex workers. In his 1999 book, “The Age of Spiritual Machines,” he wrote that by 2020, “Prostitution will be free of health risks, as will virtual sex in general. Using wireless, very-high-bandwidth communication technologies, neither sex workers nor their patrons need leave their homes. Virtual prostitution is likely to be legally tolerated, at least to a far greater extent than real prostitution is today, as the virtual variety will be impossible to monitor or control.”
Of course 2020 has come and gone. STDs are still a very real thing, as is rape, which Kurzweil also prematurely marked for expiration. Sex work is still largely illegal and that whole monitoring and control thing? They don’t call it surveillance capitalism for nothing.
For many sex workers, the fear of competition from virtual companions takes a back seat to concerns over privacy, safety, and financial security; real issues affecting real people right now. They aren’t concerned with losing market share to sex robots. They’re focused on making a living in a hostile world made worse by big tech. In their essay “Sex Work in a Postwork Imaginary: On Abolitionism, Careerism, and Respectability,” Dr Zahra Stardust and Helen Hester, make the argument that big tech is largely to blame for the issues facing sex workers today.
“While media coverage about automation and sex work predominantly focuses on the development of virtual companions and the potential for sex robots to replace sex industry jobs, sex workers are speaking out about the risks of data extraction, financial discrimination and surveillance capitalism,” Stardust and Hester write.
Today’s sex workers are subject to surveillance by facial recognition systems, doxxing by recommendation engines, and unexplained banishment from payment platforms and social media sites. They’re also up against trolls, deep fakes, revenge porn, ai censorship, and misguided anti-trafficking campaigns.
Technology has arguably made sex work safer in some ways. Many cam models and Only Fans stars might be able to avoid the tangible dangers of physical violence and STDs, but there are new threats lurking behind the unseen algorithms fueling our future. Like most utopian visions, Kurzweil’s rosy portrait of cyborg sex workers takes a dark turn when you view it from a different angle.
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