The End of Sex and the End of Thinking
The robots have arrived. And this is a problem.
Various sages across history have painted the future of the human condition as bleak. Perhaps Kurt Vonnegut’s renowned piece Player Piano serves as a strong exemplar of this view, suggesting that as technology gets more and more advanced, the roles of actual humans in pretty much all activities would decrease.
As far as I can tell, the day when that vision takes hold is today. Or, perhaps, yesterday.
As an evolutionary behavioral scientist, I am particularly interested in something called evolutionary mismatch, which is essentially the idea that regarding a broad array of features, our modern lives are mismatched from the environments that surrounded the evolutionary history of our ancestors (see my and Nicole Wedberg’s recent book Positive Evolutionary Psychology: Darwin’s Guide to a Richer Life for a detailed treatise on this topic).
Our modern worlds are mismatched from ancestral conditions in various critical ways, including, just as examples:
The fact that a majority of food offerings found in the United States today are processed, non-natural foods (see Guitar, 2017).
Most people now live in communities that are much larger than are the small-scale (roughly with populations of about 150) societies that our ancestors evolved to exist in.
We are surrounded by communication technologies, including social media, that are strongly mismatched from the face-to-face communication that characterized human evolution for thousands of generation.
And more. Way more.
While there are a broad suite of evolutionary mismatches that are wreaking havoc on the human condition as I type, I’d like to call attention to two particular issues of major concern.
Sex Robots, Pornography, and the Decline of Sex
Under ancestral conditions, one’s mating options were limited. As people were all nomadic until only about 10,000 years ago (a blink of an eye in evolutionary time), human groups were necessarily small. There was no Tinder or Match.com. There were not pornographic websites, filled with hundreds or even thousands of images of attractive adults engaged in sexual activities. And there were certainly no sex robots, which (as described in this Psychology Today piece that I wrote based on the work of Marianne Brandon) are very much on the horizon, likely to further decrease prevalence of sex in adults across the world (which has been decreasing across nearly all adult demographic groups over the past few decades).
Regardless of what perspective one subscribes to within the behavioral science, there tends to be strong agreement that a healthy sex life is part of adult health in a broader sense, including both physical and emotional health. Technologies that are driving prevalence of sex between actual people, which can be one of the most loving and connecting experiences imaginable, may well be doing a disservice when it comes to the broader human condition.
Sex robots are pretty much here. And this is a problem.
Artificial Intelligence and the Decline of Human Thought
Recently, a similarly disconcerting trend has emerged thanks to human technological advancements. Here, I refer to artificial-intelligence-based software designed to write content, such as chatGPT. As I describe in a recent Psychology Today piece that I wrote on this topic, this kind of software, which, by many accounts, is eerily effective at writing original content on pretty much any topic—in pretty much any style. With near-perfect grammar, on top of all that.
As an educator, I have to say that I find this technology more than a little worrying. The temptation to use this kind of software for students to “write” papers is, in my opinion, simply too great. It seems that it will be very hard for instructors to tell if students have used such software as these pieces are not “plagiarized” per se.
If we play this one out, we can easily envision that the amount of writing that students do—at all levels—is about to plummet. And, as many educators would, I think, agree, writing abilities are intricately connected with thinking abilities. Imagine if you were functionally illiterate when it came to being able to write. It would be a lot harder for you to gather your thoughts and express them to others, wouldn’t it?
Welcome to the New World
Kids, I have some news for you: The robots are here. And they are here to stay. The problem with technologies that are so deeply mismatched from our evolved psychology is that they tend to only go in one direction. Further, concepts related to evolutionary mismatch are not well understood by the lion’s share of people as evolution education itself is fairly dismal in the United States and in other parts of the “developed” world (see Glass et al., 2012). So people in the processed and fast food industries don’t realize how detrimental their products are from an evolutionary perspective. And software engineers creating artificial intelligence packages that can actually write usually don’t realize how deeply evolutionarily mismatched (and potentially harmful) their products are. And producers of sex robots that will be using artificial-intelligence technologies are likely not well-trained in issues of mating from an evolutionary perspective, making them less able to see human-related problems associated with their products. Same goes for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Importantly, this is not all to say that modern technology is fully evil. There are all kinds of benefits for all kinds of people that we owe to a broad suite of modern technologies. I wouldn’t be sitting here in my cozy living room typing this piece that will be nearly immediately broadcast to the entire world without modern technologies—so I am keenly aware that technologies has benefits in addition to costs. My broader point regarding evolutionary mismatch simply is that understanding our evolved minds can help us better think about the human element when it comes to modern technology.
Bottom Line and Postscript
The robots are here. They are writing and having sex for us. And you have to admit, this is kind of a scary scenario that we are living in. Understanding our evolved psychology will, hopefully, help frame the conversations and work regarding just how we, as a broader human community, will deal with advancing technologies. There is no turning back. But at the very least, we can try to mitigate problems by never forgetting the human element in regard to any and all technological advances.
Postscript: For a decade, I have written Darwin’s Subterranean World for Psychology Today. To this point, I have posted more than 400 pieces and have had more than 8 million post views. I love writing for Psychology Today and I want my readers of this Substack—The Human Condition—to rest assured that this blog is not a replacement for my Psychology Today blog but is, rather, a complement. I am seeing this space as an opportunity to go a bit outside the box in my writing and thinking. I hope you find it helpful, thought-provoking, and interesting.
And thanks so much for reading the very first post at The Human Condition!
Genuinely, Glenn
References
Geher, G. & Wedberg, N. (2020). Positive Evolutionary Psychology: Darwin’s Guide to Living a Richer Life. New York: Oxford University Press.
Glass, D. J., Wilson, D.S., & Geher, G. (2012). Evolutionary training in relation to human affairs is sorely lacking in higher education. EvoS Journal: The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium, 4(2), 16-22.
Guitar, A. (2017). Evolutionary Medicine: A not so radical (but absolutely necessary) Paradigm for Modern Health and Behavior (seminar given in SUNY New Paltz Evolutionary Studies Seminar Series)