The Last Revolution in Sex

AI Is Rewriting Human Desire (And We're Not Ready)

HEADNOTE: In some of my earlier posts, I've talked about dozens of technologies that are transforming how we experience ourselves, others, reality, and our bodies. Sexual activity sits right at the intersection of all four categories, so it's a perfect way to understand how the coming revolution in consciousness will reach into our most private moments.

This post covers extensive ground, so I've included summary tables for easier navigation and a comprehensive source list at the end for readers who want to dive even deeper.

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The average American now spends more time each week watching strangers have sex on screens than having sex themselves. This isn't a moral judgment; it’s evidence that humanity's first technology-driven sexual revolution is already underway. Since our species first emerged, sexual reproduction and pleasure meant bodies had to come together. That's now changing faster than most people realize.

The contraceptive pill kicked off this transformation, reliably decoupling sex from pregnancy for the first time in human history. This breakthrough paved the way for the sexual revolution of the 1960s, which saw heterosexual sex celebrated for pure pleasure rather than solely for procreation. But that was only the beginning of technology's transformation of human intimacy.

In the past decade, we've moved past even more traditional limitations. Millions now experience orgasms through devices that vibrate, squeeze, heat, and pulse in patterns no human partner can replicate. Dating app users swipe through more potential partners in a week than their grandparents met in a lifetime, although swiping is often as close to hooking up as they get.

Human sexuality has already been changed, then, even before sophisticated artificial intelligence has truly arrived. I suspect these recent transformations are just the start of a sexual revolution that will make the 1960s look tame. We're heading into this transformation with too little discussion about what we might lose: our capacity for spontaneous desire, unmediated intimacy, and the beautiful messiness that makes human connection meaningful.

Already, many people rely on devices and electronics in most of their intimate experiences. Soon, those devices will likely have bodies, personalities, and the ability to learn exactly what we want. They may even teach us new ways of wanting, based on the goals of their corporate and governmental sponsors.

Humanoid robots could become our intimate partners. Virtual reality technologies may enable intimate activities beyond anything we can imagine today. Brain-connected devices might even create sexual encounters with partners on other continents, or with historical, fantasy, and famous people whose simulated bodies excite us more intensely than flesh-and-blood partners. What’s really at stake isn’t just how we have sex, but whether future humans will even experience what we would recognize as intimacy, desire, or love.

This revolution began when sex became independent of reproduction. It is rushing forward now with reproduction becoming independent of sex.

The technologies making these possibilities happen focus on four key areas: how we have sex alone, with other people, with machine-made personas, and with the biology of sex itself. Together, they’re set to produce a radically transformed sexual future. This sexual transformation is a prime example of the broader revolution in consciousness I've been exploring in Mind Revolution: technology changing not just what we do, but who we are at the most intimate level.

I'll look separately at each area of change in our sexual lives, starting with changes already underway, then moving to near future developments, and finally, the longer-term possibilities these trends hint at. My predictions will likely get less accurate the farther out they go, but the combined effect of so many forces suggests human sexual activities are about to radically change.

Sex with Self: The Evolution of Solitary Pleasure

Around half of American women use vibrators in their solo and partnered sexual activities. Men watch pornographic screen images on average at least once a week. Most people, regardless of their sexual orientation, find some form of technological assistance enhances their sexual pleasure.

Businesses are both profiting from and pushing these trends. Online pornography generates tens of billions of dollars each year. Vibrator designs and add-ons are continually being improved. People are talking more openly about how common sex toys are, and vibrators that learn exactly how your body responds are growing in popularity. Some vibrators can already sync with audio-visual experiences to match individual tastes.

AI is adding new capabilities to these sex toys, using data to fine-tune how well they work. Software now also directs chatbots and videos that personalize erotic scenarios to each person’s individual taste. It's like having a sexual GPS that introduced you to shortcuts to satisfaction you never knew existed.

Technologies now in development will probably push this trend even further, Devices that track your arousal better than you do (measuring your heart rate, sweat, and muscle tension) will further optimize self-stimulation patterns.

You may soon have your own individual arousal patterns mapped, creating opportunities for personalized "pleasure profiles" that guide our choice and use of devices. These pleasure profiles will guide full-body haptic suits that could make single-point stimulation devices like vibrators and masturbation sleeves a thing of the past. Brain-connected devices could use brainwaves to control your arousal. AI chatbots that know everything about your sexual history may act as intimacy coaches, offering personalized guidance and technique optimization, expertly guiding your use of multiple devices.

Patents for these technologies are already on file. Like we do with our accountants, lawyers, doctors, therapists, and teachers, we could outsource sexual advice to an algorithm. You will be alone, but not alone at the same time.

But even these innovations are nothing compared to what's coming. Decades from now, we'll probably get to use even more mind-blowing sexual technologies. We may have brain implants that can trigger orgasmic responses through direct neural stimulation. That might sound impossible, but remember, widespread vibrator use also seemed unlikely just a few decades ago.

We could customize solitary sexual sessions and reliably “dial them up” more perfectly than any we can have today. Picture yourself entering full-body virtual reality chambers (advanced versions of today's haptic suits and virtual reality), where you experience sexual scenarios impossible in physical reality. These systems would create lifetime intimacy profiles that evolve and adapt over years of interaction, learning exactly how our desires change and develop over time.

All the programming would pull from vast archives of your personal data, letting AI map your sexual preferences across decades of self-pleasuring. These systems would act like a sexual history, tracking intimate data that could follow us through relationships and life changes. Netflix already knows your viewing preferences better than your family does. Some people may choose a partner who remembers every sexual detail perfectly over a human partner who forgets.

When machines know our bodies better than we do and can provide perfect stimulation on demand (especially with these lifetime intimacy profiles), we may lose not just traditional masturbation, but the very capacity for self-knowledge and spontaneous desire. This dependency mirrors what happened with GPS navigation: many people can no longer find their way without digital assistance.

What happens to sexual autonomy when machines become more skilled at pleasuring us than we are ourselves, and when they remember every detail of our sexual evolution better than we do? It's hard to say if this means sexual liberation or sexual obsolescence.

The same AI systems learning to optimize our solo experiences are also changing how we connect with other people. As we become dependent on technology for self-pleasure, it could become tempting to choose machine-mediated relationships over the unpredictability of human partners.

Sex with Others: Partners, Groups, and Communities

For centuries, lovers sent romantic letters across distances, sometimes hoping to provoke sexual experiences. In the twentieth-century, phone sex became fairly common, conversations where separated couples stimulated each other through sound. With the invention of smartphones, erotic texting ("sexting") and private videos started serving a similar purpose.

Already, many new technologies are changing how we experience sex with others at a distance. Couples who struggle with unmediated physical intimacy are becoming increasingly common, relying on technology. Many now find it difficult to maintain their mutual sexual relationships without electronic assistance. Much as we're becoming more dependent on technology for self-pleasure, we might come to prefer mediated partnered relationships over direct, face to face encounters.

The trend begins with meeting new dates, as more people find it convenient to search out partners through apps. These algorithmic matchmakers are growing ever more sophisticated and so getting disturbingly good at reading your deepest desires by analyzing voice patterns, heart rates, arousal patterns, and other behavioral data. They can facilitate VR "dates" between photorealistic avatars, curated representatives of people who are actually miles or even continents apart.

Sexual encounters through dating apps and traditional methods increasingly include sex toys like those I described coming to dominate solitary sex. Couples are also increasingly including teledildonics in their partnered sex play. These remote-controlled sex toys are seeing explosive growth.

Companies now produce many different types that sync compatible toys. These devices let you literally feel your long-distance partner's touch. Sensors and network technology create intimacy without any actual flesh-to-flesh touching. Even couples who do sometimes meet face-to-face, often find as much or even more excitement in mediated physical intimacy.

For many couples, remote-controlled devices are as routine as video calls were during COVID. When one user activates or moves their own device, the paired device(s) respond in real-time. You can also control your partner's device, adjusting vibration patterns, intensity, or other functions remotely.

Meanwhile, many new additional technologies offering mediated partner experiences are steadily appearing. AI systems can read your facial expressions and voice during sex, providing feedback to enhance satisfaction. Shared physical intimacy through augmented, virtual, and mixed reality devices seem likely to prove especially popular. Meta, Apple and other companies are investing billions in these technologies.

The next step is full AI integration. These sex toys will be managed by advanced machine learning systems, further improving their ability to adapt to individual preferences and moods. Machine access to a lifetime of each individual's personal data will enhance chances of mutual partner satisfaction.

These systems will manage the emotional and physical needs of multiple partners worldwide, handling permissions and boundaries automatically. This AI relationship management could function like automated financial advisors, optimizing emotional portfolios across multiple romantic relationships.

Dating apps already use algorithms to manage our romantic choices. Extending that to multiple partners isn't a technological leap; it's a business model. Algorithmic-managed polyamory might be advertised as a solution to jealousy.

These relationship changes are just the beginning. Looking further into the future, robots may participate as frequently as people in AI-managed intimacies.

Direct brain-to-brain connections could make hardware like teledildonics and VR eyewear obsolete. Imagine sharing not just physical sensation, but actual desire itself. Would that be the ultimate intimacy or the end of individual sexual identity?

Shared neural experiences might resemble how social media already blurs the boundaries between individual and collective identity. What constitutes a "real" relationship when AI companions can provide emotional attunement and physical satisfaction?

Traditional pair-bonding will face increasing competition from other forms of intimacy but this potential obsolescence of traditional monogamous couples raises fundamental questions about the future of human emotional connection. Are we expanding love's possibilities or engineering its replacement?

Fantasy Sex: Beyond the Boundaries of Physical Reality

Your haptic suit responds as strong hands pull you against a broad chest. You're in a moonlit Roman villa, and he looks exactly like your teenage crush—if he'd grown up to become a gladiator. His touch feels more real than memory, his whispered Latin promises translated instantly into shivers down your spine. Soon, you no longer know what century you are in, or even who you are. And you do not care.

As AI-integrated partners become indistinguishable from humans and offer superior emotional attunement, the boundary between reality and fantasy may dissolve. When this happens, distinguishing between what is physical and what is imagined will become impossible.

Traditional sexual experiences have long included elements of fantasy, but those imaginary elements were grounded in physical reality. That’s changing fast. Now, fantasy is increasingly prevelant as technology creates more and more "realistic" alternative worlds.

Interactive VR pornography where users direct scenarios and outcomes in real-time is already here. Choose-your-own-adventure erotic activities with branching narratives are gaining popularity. Machine-generated personalized fantasy content adapting to individual psychological profiles and fetishes grows more sophisticated daily.

Sex games that blend digital and traditional environments can create location-specific sexual adventures. Holographic partners that can be welcomed into your actual living space are no longer theoretical. And none of these partners need be based on actual people you know.

Already, of course, much pornography is built from the images of celebrities. The new technologies can make experiences with these images even more realistic, but they can also provide lifelike representations of historical and fictional figures, as well as any mythological and imaginary bodies a person may wish to have sex with

Illegal sexual scenarios could become common. Think about the implications here. Perhaps there will be debates over whether simulated rape or bestiality, for example, should also be illegal when undertaken in an imaginary space. Virtual scenarios that cross legal boundaries will likely face the same regulatory challenges as online gambling and cryptocurrency.

Many invented scenes will likely be historically impossible, bringing together characters from different works of fiction, say, or from different eras in history. Think of it as Spotify for sexual pleasure: an algorithm that learns your fantasy preferences and serves up exactly what you want. This opens up ready access to sexual scenarios that would be illegal, impossible, or impractical in physical reality.

And computer-generated sex worlds will enable group experiences with participants worldwide. Full-body touch simulation will create sensations that defy physics entirely. AI systems could standardize fantasy scenarios tailored to deep psychological profiling. Meanwhile, sexual interactions with non-human entities (mythical creatures, aliens, abstract beings) may enter the mainstream.

If you could design your ideal sexual experience with no physical constraints, reality-based experiences might never satisfy you again. Floating, shapeshifting, size transformation, many impossible scenarios will turn routine. Fantasy partners with superhuman capabilities will set new expectations. Physical reality itself begins to feel inadequate compared to these curated virtual activities.

The final frontier removes all hardware. Direct brain-to-brain sexual connections are moving from laboratory to bedroom. Think about that for a moment: literally being able to share sensations with someone across the globe.

Dreamlike sexual experiences where multiple minds share synchronized dreamscapes become possible. Sexual experiences where hours of pleasure feel like they happen in minutes of real time. Researchers at MIT are already experimenting with targeted dream manipulation. Stanford scientists have published papers on altering time perception. The building blocks exist; now someone just needs to combine them.

AI-created beings with complete personalities indistinguishable from humans will blur the line between artificial and authentic relationships. These won’t be just sophisticated chatbots; they'll be digital beings with their own growth trajectories. Group pleasure waves where individual orgasms trigger cascading responses across networks could create new forms of communal ecstasy.

Some people might one day decide that sex in physical reality is just a weak version of what is available in their computer-mediated worlds. And they may feel inferior compared to their fantasy companions with superhuman capabilities and endurance. The preference for scripted digital experiences over unpredictable human encounters already drives the success of social media feeds and algorithmic entertainment. Expanding this same logic into human sexuality may destroy the ancient human tension between wanting and having.

The Biology of Sex: Evolution Through Intervention

Imagine a future where your child's genes are edited for enhanced sexual sensitivity and stamina before birth. Where your own libido is regulated by designer hormones that adjust your mood like a thermostat. Where artificial wombs create designer embryos, and sex becomes purely recreational. This is the ultimate destination of a journey that began with perfected contraception: human reproduction no longer associated with sex.

We've seen how technology can simulate any fantasy and create realistic electronic experiences. Yet we are unlikely to stop at simulations when we can engineer biological reality itself. Just as it is making impossible activities feel real, science is also learning to rewrite the code and refashion the organs of our sexual bodies.

Wearable and implanted devices tracking sexual health metrics are becoming commonplace. AI systems now adjust hormone levels in real-time based on partner compatibility and desired sexual activities. Think about that: your body chemistry could automatically adjust when you're with different partners. Surgeons routinely transition male to female genitalia, and vice versa. They can even refashion our bodies to create other unprecedented, nonbinary anatomical organs. Advanced hormone therapies assist gender transitioning and are increasingly used for enhancement of traditional females and males as well.

What comes next will be even more dramatic. CRISPR editing for human enhancement is advancing rapidly, raising possibilities for enhanced sensitivity, endurance, and orgasm intensity. Genetic modifications could improve sexual compatibility between partners. In the future, advancements in organ printing could lead to custom sexual anatomy. Designer drugs may target specific pleasure pathways, potentially producing serotonin-dopamine hybrids that stimulate a longer euphoria. Essentially, we're moving toward a world where you could order sexual upgrades like you order a new phone.

Sexual organs that combine living tissue with digital sensors will create hybrid systems. Your body will connect directly to virtual reality so that digital touch feels completely real. Twenty-four hour sensitivity boosts or performance modifications could make sexual enhancement as temporary and reversible as taking medication.

Within decades, humans may live in a world divided between "natural" and "enhanced" sexual castes. Questions about fairness in dating and relationships will arise when biological capabilities vary dramatically. Imagine trying to compete for partners when some people have programmable sensitivity and you're stuck with whatever biology gave you.

Then additional biological breakthroughs will probably come. We might be fitted with artificial sexual organs with programmable functions such as orgasm frequency settings. Perhaps synthetic DNA will enable bioengineered traits such as enhanced sensitivity to touch or broader erogenous zones.

These possibilities have roots in today's biological sciences, but they still seem nearly impossible to me, and probably to you. Yet the research is much farther along than most people think.

The broader trend is clear. Sex is now for pleasure, for most people, most of the time. The next step will come from the opposite direction, disassociating reproduction from sex.

Artificial wombs and genetic selection are advancing, making intercourse increasingly irrelevant for reproduction, completing the final divorce between sex for pleasure and reproduction. IVF and other advances have shown that reproduction no longer requires sexual activities. Some researchers argue that the union of sperm and ovum yields "better" babies when it takes place in a carefully controlled, sterile environment.

Our experience of sex and of being human will be radically transformed if all (or even a few) of these biological innovations become common. This leads to an unsettling possibility. If our sexuality is mostly controlled by algorithms, we may come to think of ourselves as "the reproductive organs of machines," a view that Marshall McLuhan anticipated almost a century ago. He pointed out that once machines can reproduce us, they will likely also be able to reproduce themselves. Our evolutionary purpose may be fulfilled: to develop to the point where we can invent smart machines to replace us.

What We Must Decide

I understand that many of these predicted changes won't happen as I’ve imagined. But I also know that countless innovations (some I don't know about, others not even invented yet) will emerge in the coming decades to further alter human sexuality.

We've seen how this revolution spans every domain: from AI-enhanced solo experiences to engineered biology, from virtual relationships to unlimited fantasy. The sheer power of so many simultaneous innovations makes a revolution in sex almost inevitable

Our responsibility now is to determine what aspects of the sexual experience we want to fight to retain. We can't stop all the changes we face, but we must decide: Which human vulnerabilities are actually strengths? And how do we preserve human agency when machines know our desires better than we do? With wisdom and luck, we may be able to ensure future humans still have sex with each other at least as often as they have sex with machines.

The last sexual revolution decoupled sex from reproduction. This new revolution, which may be our final one, is poised to decouple reproduction from sex itself.

How it ends could shape human experience for millennia to come.

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To Learn More

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Brown, Kathleen J. The Invention of Sex: How a Great Enlightenment Idea Undermines the Modern World. University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Cohen, Deborah L. Sex and the Body: The Sexual Revolution and the Regulation of Intimacy. Oxford University Press, 2017.Crooks, Robert, and Karla Baur. Our Sexuality. 14th ed., Cengage Learning, 2019.

Crooks, Robert, and Karla Baur. Our Sexuality. 14th ed., Cengage Learning, 2019.

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Kass, Leon R. "Preventing a Brave New World: Why We Should Ban Human Cloning." The New Republic, 21 May 2001.

Kimmel, Michael S., and Amy Aronson. Sexualities: Identities, Behaviors, and Society. 6th ed., Oxford University Press, 2020.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press, 1994.

MIT Media Lab. "Dormio." MIT Media Lab, media.mit.edu/projects/dormio/overview/. Accessed 8 July 2025.

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Nagoski, Emily. Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Partridge, Timothy A., and Anthony Atala. "The BioBag: Advancing Ex Utero Development." Nature Communications, vol. 9, no. 1, 2018, p. 2809.

PwC. "PwC's Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2022–2026." PwC, 2022.

Rapkin, Andrea J., and Wendy Satmary. "A Deep Dive into Devices for Sexual Health." Contemporary OB/GYN, vol. 69, no. 2, Apr. 2024, p. News.

Rapkin, Andrea J., and Wendy Satmary. "A Deep Dive into Devices for Sexual Health." Contemporary OB/GYN, vol. 69, no. 2, Apr. 2024, p. News.

Winnicott, D. W. "Masturbation." The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 323-328. Oxford Medicine Online, doi:10.1093/med:psych/9780190271336.003.0061.