In the story of Pandora’s Box Zeus fashions the perfect woman to exact revenge on Prometheus for giving humans fire, her name was Pandora. Despite being warned not to open her jar, curiosity got the better of her one night she lifts the lid and evils such as want, envy and hatred fly out to plague mankind. She closed the lid as quickly as she could but the only thing she managed to capture forever was hope.
Many have debated the meaning of this story over the years. But perhaps it is us who will come to know its meaning. Technological development is making it increasingly likely that we too could have the power to fashion the perfect women.
Even today technology sells men their dream girl without even having to leave the couch. There are endless girls on OnlyFans and PornHub. All the girls in your city on Tinder. And if all those girls are too real and complicated there are virtual girlfriends to boot. Relations have never been so frictionless. Already, a whole technological marketplace has cropped up to give men the experience of sex or romantic relationships without needing to - well - deal with a human female. Or as Mr Bungle sang in 1991:
“Ain't got no woman next to me
I just got this magazine
And what's on the TV screen
But that's okay with me”
In the not too distant future algorithms could be able to create the perfect woman for an individual man's preferences and enable him to interact with them in VR or robotic forms that will increasingly look and act like women. Dianna Fliechman has termed this the Uncanny Vulva.
Women might not be able to compete with the machines - and they might not even want to. Unlike today when the offering of sexual stimuli is almost purely visual - and therefore aimed at and appeals to men - the next frontier of technological development might actually out-complete human males.
In The Mating Mind, Geoffrey Miller asserts that creative intelligence is an evolved trait akin to a peacock's tail. The peacock's long tail makes a bird more susceptible to being lunch and also takes more lunch to produce. It is less than practical - in fact it is counter to survival - its only purpose is to attract a peahen. Likewise creative intelligence takes huge amounts of resources for very little practical usage, leading evolutionary psychologists to believe it evolved for the purpose of sex selection.
If you need proof of this look at the walls of a teenage girl's bedroom. It is covered in posters of musicians - not six-packed gym junkies. Likewise, pictures of men aimed at women aren’t the pictures of ripped guys aimed at gay men, instead, it's Instagram pages like the hugely popular ‘Hot Dudes Reading’.
But at the current rate of technological development creative intelligence could very well be subsumed by machines. Algorithms will likely be able to make better art than humans as they can predict exactly what will elicit the best response from the audience.
In pop culture (for example the movie Her) it is usually a nerdy man that falls for the AI, but it doesn’t take a huge amount of imagination to think that women might be the ones to fall for the disembodied machines. Particularly if it can read her emotions and compose the perfect poem for exactly the right moment.
If we think relations between the sexes are bad now. Wait until the Techno-Sexual Revolution happens and machines can be better and more attractive to both men and women. What kind of Pandora’s Jar will we be opening? Will we cease to form relationships and have families? Will men and women no longer have any need or want for each other whatsoever? Are we so sure that this isn’t an experiment that will end in misery?
But - unlike in the original story of Pandora - there is hope…
*** This is the start of an essay I wrote for Mathilde Magazine, to read the full piece please order it here.