Disconnect: the VR age will be a dream…and a nightmare

Disconnect is a weekly column in which Tech in Asia’s Charlie Custer pokes at holes, plays devil’s advocate, or otherwise attempts to rain on the tech industry’s parade.

2016 is clearly the year of VR. This year we’re finally getting commercial versions of the “big three” VR headsets: the Oculus Rift, the Valve/HTC Vive, and the PlayStation VR. Granted, they’re all ridiculously expensive. There’s not much content for them yet. This won’t be the year that VR goes mainstream, but it’ll be remembered as the year when things started getting serious. It may also be remembered as the year we see the first signs of some serious problems.

The end of sex

Photo by Leon israel

I’m really excited about VR tech, but I first began to wonder seriously about its social implications when I read this reddit post last year. The author, a divorced man in his 30s, wrote that he has come to prefer VR porn to actual sex. The reasons why are, to me at least, troubling. He writes:

For me, the “Squeaky Mattress” [VR porn] video comes incredibly close to simulating real sex. Granted, you cannot feel their bodies, but the visual stimulus is just so good! Forgive me for getting graphic, but I’m having the best orgasms of my life using VR porn.

On top of that, when I’m done, I don’t have to worry about the emotions of another human being. And I don’t have to put my own emotions on the line. There’s nothing at stake. There’s no possibility of heartache. It’s just sex, there for you whenever you want it, with zero strings attached.

I feel like I might be okay with never having another relationship again, and using VR as my sole sexual outlet.

Now obviously this is just one man’s opinion. And as a divorced man, he might be more primed than most of us to accept the idea of sex without a human relationship being a desirable outcome. But keep in mind that this is also a man who’s using low-end, first-gen VR tech to watch very-early-stage VR content. This is the VR equivalent of a silent film viewed on a tiny, black-and-white TV. Give VR technology another decade of development and it will be infinitely more immersive than it is now. Give VR content another decade of development and there will be highly gripping, immersive content that’s perfectly attuned to users’ desires. If VR porn right now is making this guy think of giving up real-world sex, imagine the impact of VR porn after another ten years of content and tech development.

Some among you may say: who cares? Why shouldn’t people switch to VR porn if it’s better than real sex? Why shouldn’t we let VR “disrupt” human relationships in the same way innovative tech has disrupted other aspects of our lives?

I don’t know, and that’s the problem. It’s easy to imagine some dystopian scenario wherein humanity gets so into VR sex that we masturbate ourselves out of existence, or wherein people become so accustomed to instant sexual gratification that rapes become more common in real-world human interactions where people desire sex and VR isn’t immediately available. It’s equally easy to imagine utopian scenarios where VR sex experiences change society for the better, removing some of the sex-related problems from everyday life and allowing men and women of all appearances to have more genuine, less sexually-motivated experiences with each other.

But those are wild guesses. The reality is that we have no idea what the effect widely-available, wholly-immersive VR porn would have on society. We’re pretty terrible at predicting the effects tech will have in the future, so we’re essentially going into this blind.

Recipe for addiction

Misleading manipulations

It’s not all doom and gloom