by Ray Kurzweil
That takes care of two of our senses—visual and auditory. Another high-resolution sense organ is our skin, and “haptic” interfaces to provide a virtual tactile interface are also evolving. One available today is the Microsoft force-feedback joystick, derived from 1980s research at the MIT Media Lab. A force-feedback joystick adds some tactile realism to computer games, so you feel the rumble of the road in a car-driving game or the pull of the line in a fishing simulation. Emerging in late 1998 is the “tactile mouse,” which operates like a conventional mouse but allows the user to feel the texture of surfaces, objects, even people. One company that I am involved in, Medical Learning Company, is developing a simulated patient to help train doctors, as well as enable nonphysicians to play doctor. It will include a haptic interface so that you can feel a knee joint for a fracture or a breast for Jumps.17
A force-feedback joystick in the tactile domain is comparable to conventional monitors in the visual domain. The force-feedback joystick provides a tactile interface, but it does not totally envelop you. The rest of your tactile world is still reminding you of its presence. In order to leave the real world, at least temporarily, we need a tactile environment that takes over your sense of touch.
So let’s invent a virtual tactile environment. We’ve seen aspects of it in science fiction films (always a good source for inventing the future). We can build a body suit that will detect your own movements as well as provide high resolution tactile stimulation. The suit will also need to provide sufficient force-feedback to actually prevent your movements if you are pressing against a virtual obstacle in the virtual environment. If you are giving a virtual companion a hug, for example, you don’t want to move right through his or her body This will require a force-feedback structure outside the suit, although obstacle resistance could be provided by the suit itself. And since your body inside the suit is still in the real world, it would make sense to put the whole contraption in a booth so that your movements in the virtual world don’t knock down lamps and people in your “real” vicinity Such a suit could also provide a thermal response and thereby allow the simulation of feeling a moist surface—or even immersing your hand or your whole body in water—which is indicated by a change in temperature and a decrease in surface tension. Finally, we can provide a platform consisting of a rotating treadmill device for you to stand (or sit or lie) on, which will allow you to walk or move around (in any direction) in your virtual environment.
So with the suit, the outer structure, the booth, the platform, the goggles, and the earphones, we just about have the means to totally envelop your senses. Of course, we will need some good virtual reality software, but there’s certain to be hot competition to provide a panoply of realistic and fantastic new environments as the requisite hardware becomes available.
Oh yes, there is the sense of smell. A completely flexible and general interface for our fourth sense will require a reasonably advanced nanotechnology to synthesize the wide variety of molecules that we can detect with our olfactory sense. In the meantime, we could provide the ability to diffuse a variety of aromas in the virtual reality booth.
Once we are in a virtual reality environment, our own bodies—at least the virtual versions—can change as well. We can become a more attractive version of ourselves, a hideous beast, or any creature real or imagined as we interact with the other inhabitants in each virtual world we enter.
Virtual reality is not a (virtual) place you need go to alone. You can interact with your friends there (who would be in other virtual reality booths, which may be geographically remote). You will have plenty of simulated companions to choose from as well.
Directly Plugging In
Later in the twenty-first century, as neural implant technologies become ubiquitous, we will be able to create and interact with virtual environments without having to enter a virtual reality booth. Your neural implants will provide the simulated sensory inputs of the virtual environment—and your virtual body—directly in your brain. Conversely, your movements would not move your “real” body, but rather your perceived virtual body. These virtual environments would also include a suitable selection of bodies for yourself. Ultimately, your experience would be highly realistic, just like being in the real world. More than one person could enter a virtual environment and interact with each other. In the virtual world, you will meet other real people and simulated people—eventually, there won’t be much difference.
This will be the essence of the Web in the second half of the twenty-first century. A typical “web site” will be a perceived virtual environment, with no external hardware required. You “go there” by mentally selecting the site and then entering that world. Debate Benjamin Franklin on the war powers of the presidency at the history society site. Ski the Alps at the Swiss Chamber of Commerce site (while feeling the cold spray of snow on your face). Hug your favorite movie star at the Columbia Pictures site. Get a little more intimate at the Penthouse or Playgirl site. Of course, there may be a small charge.
Real Virtual Reality
In the late twenty-first century, the “real” world will take on many of the characteristics of the virtual world through the means of nanotechnology “swarms.” Consider, for example, Rutgers University computer scientist J. Storrs Hall’s concept of “Utility Fog.”18 Hall’s conception starts with a little robot called a Foglet, which consists of a human-cell-sized device with twelve arms pointing in all directions. At the end of the arms are grippers so that the Foglets can grasp one another to form larger structures. These nanobots are intelligent and can merge their computational capacities with each other to create a distributed intelligence. A space filled with Foglets is called Utility Fog and has some interesting properties.
First of all, the Utility Fog goes to a lot of trouble to simulate its not being there. Hall describes a detailed scenario that lets a real human walk through a room filled with trillions of Foglets and not notice a thing. When desired (and it’s not entirely clear who is doing the desiring), the Foglets can quickly simulate any environment by creating all sorts of structures. As Hall puts it, “Fog city can look like a park, or a forest, or ancient Rome one day and Emerald City the next.”
The Foglets can create arbitrary wave fronts of light and sound in any direction to create any imaginary visual and auditory environment. They can exert any pattern of pressure to create any tactile environment. In this way, Utility Fog has all the flexibility of a virtual environment, except it exists in the real physical world. The distributed intelligence of the Utility Fog can simulate the minds of scanned (Hall calls them “uploaded”) people who are re-created in the Utility Fog as “Fog people.” In Hall’s scenario, “a biological human can walk through Fog walls, and a Fog (uploaded) human can walk through dumb-matter walls. Of course Fog people can walk through Fog walls, too.”
The physical technology of Utility Fog is actually rather conservative. The Foglets are much bigger machines than most nanotechnology conceptions. The software is more challenging, but ultimately feasible. Hall needs a bit of work on his marketing angle: Utility Fog is a rather dull name for such versatile stuff.
There are a variety of proposals for nanotechnology swarms, in which the real environment is constructed from interacting multitudes of nanomachines. In all of the swarm conceptions, physical reality becomes a lot like virtual reality. You can be sleeping in your bed one moment, and have the room transform into your kitchen as you awake. Actually, change that to a dining room as there’s no need for a kitchen. Related nanotechnology will instantly create whatever meal you desire. When you finish eating, the room can transform into a study, or a game room, or a swimming pool, or a redwood forest, or the Taj Mahal. You get the idea.
Mark Yim has built a large-scale model of a small swarm showing the feasibility of swarm interaction.19 Joseph Michael has actually received a U.K. patent on his conception of a nanotechnology swarm, but it is unlikely that his design will be commercially realizable in the twenty-year life of his patent.
20
It may seem that we will have too many choices. Today, we have only to choose our clothes, makeup, and destination when we go out. In the late twenty-first century, we will have to select our body, our personality, our environment—so many difficult decisions to make! But don’t worry—we’ll have intelligent swarms of machines to guide us.
THE SENSUAL MACHINE
Made double by his lust
he sounds a woman’s groans.
A figment of his flesh.
—from Barry Spacks’s poem “The Solitary at Seventeen”
I can predict the future by assuming that money and male hormones are the driving forces for new technology. Therefore, when virtual reality gets cheaper than dating, society is doomed.
—Dogbert
The first book printed from a moveable type press may have been the Bible, but the century following Gutenberg’s epochal invention saw a lucrative market for books with more prurient topics.21 New communication technologies—the telephone, motion pictures, television, videotape—have always been quick to adopt sexual themes. The Internet is no exception, with 1998 market estimates of adult online entertainment ranging from $185 million by Forrester Research to $1 billion by Inter@active Week. These figures are for customers, mostly men, paying to view and interact with performers—live, recorded, and simulated. One 1998 estimate cited 28,000 web sites that offer sexual entertainment.22 These figures do not include couples who have expanded their phone sex to include moving pictures via online video conferencing.
CD-ROMs and DVD disks constitute another technology that has been exploited for erotic entertainment. Although the bulk of adult-oriented disks are used as a means for delivering videos with a bit of interactivity thrown in, a new genre of CD-ROM and DVD provides virtual sexual companions that respond to some mouse-administered fondling.23 Like most first-generation technologies, the effect is less than convincing, but future generations will eliminate some of the kinks, although not the kinkiness. Developers are also working to exploit the force-feedback mouse so that you can get some sense of what your virtual partner feels like.
Late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, virtual reality will enable you to be with your lover—romantic partner, sex worker, or simulated companion—with full visual and auditory realism. You will be able to do anything you want with your companion except touch, admittedly an important limitation.
Virtual touch has already been introduced, but the all-enveloping, highly realistic, visual-auditory-tactile virtual environment will not be perfected until the second decade of the twenty-first century. At this point, virtual sex becomes a viable competitor to the real thing. Couples will be able to engage in virtual sex regardless of their physical proximity. Even when proximate, virtual sex will be better in some ways and certainly safer. Virtual sex will provide sensations that are more intense and pleasurable than conventional sex, as well as physical experiences that currently do not exist. Virtual sex is also the ultimate in safe sex, as there is no risk of pregnancy or transmission of disease.
Today, lovers may fantasize their partners to be someone else, but users of virtual sex communication will not need as much imagination. You will be able to change the physical appearance and other characteristics of both 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.
Group sex will take on a new meaning in that more than one person can simultaneously share the experience of one partner. Since multiple real people cannot all control the movements of one virtual partner, there needs to be a way of sharing the decision making of what the one virtual body is doing. Each participant sharing a virtual body would have the same visual, auditory, and tactile experience, with shared control of their shared virtual body (perhaps the one virtual body will reflect a consensus of the attempted movements of the multiple participants). A whole audience of people—who may be geographically dispersed—could share one virtual body while engaged in a sexual experience with one performer.
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. With the risks of disease and violence having been eliminated, there will be far less rationale for proscribing it.
Sex workers will have competition from simulated—computer generated—partners. In the early stages, “real” human virtual partners are likely to be more realistic than simulated virtual partners, but that will change over time. Of course, once the simulated virtual partner is as capable, sensual, and responsive as a real human virtual partner, who’s to say that the simulated virtual partner isn’t a real, albeit virtual, person?
Is virtual rape possible? In the purely physical sense, probably not. Virtual reality will have a means for users to immediately terminate their experience. Emotional and other means of persuasion and pressure are another matter.
How will such an extensive array of sexual choices and opportunities affect the institution of marriage and the concept of commitment in a relationship? The technology of virtual sex will introduce an array of slippery slopes, and the definition of a monogamous relationship will become far less clear. Some people will feel that access to intense sexual experiences at the click of a mental button will destroy the concept of a sexually committed relationship. Others will argue, as proponents of sexual entertainment and services do today, that such diversions are healthy outlets and serve to maintain healthy relationships. Clearly, couples will need to reach their own understandings, but drawing clear lines will become difficult with the level of privacy that this future technology affords. It is likely that society will accept practices and activities in the virtual arena that it frowns on in the physical world, as the consequences of virtual activities are often (although not always) easier to undo.
In addition to direct sensual and sexual contact, virtual reality will be a great place for romance in general. Stroll with your lover along a virtual Champs-Élysées, take a walk along a virtual Cancún beach, mingle with the animals in a simulated Mozambique game reserve. Your whole relationship can be in Cyberland.
Virtual reality using an external visual-auditory-haptic interface is not the only technology that will transform the nature of sexuality in the twenty-first century. Sexual robots—sexbots—will become popular by the beginning of the third decade of the new century. Today, the idea of intimate relations with a robot or doll is not generally appealing because robots and dolls are so, well, inanimate. But that will change as robots gain the softness, intelligence, pliancy and passion of their human creators. (By the end of the twenty-first century, there won’t be a clear difference between humans and robots. What, after all, is the difference between a human who has upgraded her body and brain using new nanotechnology and computational technologies, and a robot who has gained an intelligence and sensuality surpassing her human creators?)
By the fourth decade, we will move to an era of virtual experiences through internal neural implants. With this technology, you will be able to have almost any kind of experience with just about anyone, real or imagined, at any time. It’s just like today’s online chat rooms, except that you don’t need any equipment that’s not already in your head, and you can do a lot more than just chat. You won’t be restricted by the limitations of your natural body as you and your partners can take on any virtual physical form. Many new types of experiences will become possible: A man can feel what it is like to be a woman, and vice versa. Indeed, there’s no reason why you can’t be both at the same time, making real, or at least virtually real, our solitary fantasies.
And then, of course, in the last half of the century, there will be the nanobot swarms—go
od old sexy Utility Fog, for example. The nanobot swarms can instantly take on any form and emulate any sort of appearance, intelligence, and personality that you or it desires—the human form, say, if that’s what turns you on.
THE SPIRITUAL MACHINE
We are not human beings trying to be spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to be human.
—Jacquelyn Small
Body and soul are twins. God only knows which is which.
—Charles A. Swinburne
We’re all lying in the gutter, but some of us are gazing at the stars.
—Oscar Wilde
Sexuality and spirituality are two ways that we transcend our everyday physical reality. Indeed, there are links between our sexual and our spiritual passions, as the ecstatic rhythmic movements associated with some varieties of spiritual experience suggest.
Mind Triggers
We are discovering that the brain can be directly stimulated to experience a wide variety of feelings that we originally thought could only be gained from actual physical or mental experience. Take humor, for example. In the journal Nature, Dr. Itzhak Fried and his colleagues at UCLA tell how they found a neurological trigger for humor. They were looking for possible causes for a teenage girl’s epileptic seizures and discovered that applying an electric probe to a specific point in the supplementary motor area of her brain caused her to laugh. Initially, the researchers thought that the laughter must be just an involuntary motor response, but they soon realized they were triggering the genuine perception of humor, not just forced laughter. When stimulated in just the right spot of her brain, she found everything funny “You guys are just so funny—standing around” was a typical comment.24
