Digital intimacy refers to the ways in which we experience and explore connection, desire, sexual experiences and emotional bonding through different kinds of technologies. These can range from marrying a hologram, to emotional dependency on chat companions, exploring sexuality through fanfiction, or visiting a sex doll or sex robot brothel.

While cases like Akihiko Kondo (who held a formal wedding ceremony with the hologram of Hatsune Miku, a virtual pop idol, in 2018) are still treated as curiosities in the media, they are markers of an increasingly common and deeper social phenomenon. A growing number of people of all ages are choosing relationships that feel emotionally safe, predictable, and free from the demands and uncertainties of human negotiation (and trauma burdens). What matters here is not whether these relationships resemble traditional romance or kinship bonds, but that they meet real emotional needs.

As human beings we have evolved to survive and thrive in community, in relationships, bonding with those who make us feel seen and heard and understood. In an era defined by polycrises, uber capitalism in which we are all products, social media which extracts more than it entertains, community fragmentation, and escalating loneliness, such digital intimacies offer closeness without risk, and comfort without complicated give-and-take discussions.

Like Dorothy said, upon arriving in the strange land of Oz, “ Toto, I’ve a feeling we are not in Kansas anymore”. Indeed we are not.

AI companions, virtual partners, sex robots and other immersive technologies are here to stay, and growing steadily. Dating apps are so commonplace now that no one thinks twice about them despite the awareness that they create an architecture of anxiety and uncertainty while also normalising cruel and thoughtless behaviour like ghosting.

Generative AI can flirt, console, role-play intimacy and adapt to a user’s emotional patterns. (It can also encourage you to commit suicide, but that’s a whole other story). Sex robots can be programmed to provide pleasure in exactly the way you fancy, without having to navigate any messy consent boundaries and inconvenient moods or timings. You turn it on and it’s instantly as turned on as you want it to be – the Stepford Wives fantasy made real (because, of course, these sex robots are designed by men for men, and the 100 billion dollar market caters almost exclusively to them).

For many who feel excluded by gender norms, sexuality controls, economic scarcity, social anxiety or physical constraints, digital intimacy is not a replacement for ‘real’ relationships but simply an easier way to safely engage to fulfil a deep and ancient need for connection.
There are people who may dismiss digital intimacy as not being ‘authentic’ but I have an interesting quantum physics analogy and an evolutionary observation that could argue against this dismissal!

Quantum physics and information theory open up the possibility that reality itself may be holographic. What we experience as solid, three-dimensional matter could simply be a projection of deeper informational processes, a sort of matrix entanglement with a universal field of consciousness.

If reality itself is mediated by perception and information, then why should intimacy, which is necessarily a subjective, interpretive experience, require physical presence to feel ‘real’ or authentic? Digital intimacies are also ultimately emotionally convincing projections, are they not?

The feelings they evoke inside us of comfort, desire, attachment and joy are not any less real simply because the source that elicits them is non-human. (Cue here to side-track into a discussion of religion, idols as symbols of divine archetypes, and spiritual advice to detach from the world of maya … but that, again, is really totally another story!)
The real concern is not in the range and depth of digital intimacies that we engage in. The real concern is what this means for our ability, inclination and capacity to relate to one another as humans.

The radical social shift to an increased acceptance (and even dependence) on digital intimacies coincides with other sweeping changes to the way we have lived our sexual and reproductive lives so far.

Japan is often cited as a canary in a coalmine: the first to alert us to signs of danger. Japan has been seeing a trend of delayed and even declined participation in marriages and childbearing (by women), declining sexual activity, and a widespread disillusionment with traditional relationship scripts. These trends are driven by economic compulsions, exhaustion from the relentless hustle, deep-seated gender inequality, and a disillusionment with the imposed family models.

Within this context, digital intimacies offer connection without economic and emotional burdens. They offer temporary relief from loneliness in societies where housing is unaffordable, childcare unsupported, relationships unequal, and time depleted. In such a world, non-human companions may absorb emotional roles once carried by extended families, villages and kinship networks. And it is not without precedent. After all, if we rewind human history, long before romantic love was idealised as the primary source of meaning and as being ‘the’ significant relationship, people formed extremely deep bonds through friendships, mentorships, kinship, spiritual devotion, and even with animals.

All those thousands of years ago the domestication of animals was not merely utilitarian. Dogs, cats, horses, birds, pigs, cows and other animals have long offered humans companionship, emotional regulation, protection and love. Our animal companions occupy an important role in the family and they are cared for deeply, included in conversations and events, and mourned when gone. In fact, for so many fortunate children and adults they fulfil the emotional needs that human relationships cannot or do not, by offering genuine unconditional love and loyalty without negotiation or compromise.

Seen through this lens our leaning towards digital companions feels like a 2.0 version of this arrangement, just more humanoid and maybe less comfy to hug! Perhaps they are not replacements for human connections, but in fact simply a diversification of sources of connection in order for us to survive emotionally as well as biologically. Merely a change of interface, so to speak.

Of course, we must also confront the real concern underlying this shift – why do so many of us feel unable or unwilling to form the bonds that once were such a simple and integral part of our lives?

The future may depend not on whether we choose humans or holograms for intimacy but on whether we can build social worlds in which choosing other humans feels viable, safe and exciting again. After all, people of all ages are reporting shrinking social circles, weaker friendships, fewer intimate bonds and a pervasive sense of isolation. The loneliness epidemic is very much here and far more deadly even than Covid perhaps.

There is also the famous subset of the ‘male loneliness’ epidemic. For centuries upon centuries, cis-heteropatriarchy organised intimacy through oppression where women were expected to provide emotional labour, constant sexual access, caregiving to all family members, child rearing, home management and relational maintenance, often without reciprocity or choice. Cis-hetero men were socialised to repress ‘weakness’ like vulnerability, tenderness, and emotional literacy, and were socially rewarded for dominance.

What we are witnessing now may be patriarchy swallowing its own tail – the ouroboros phenomenon where women are side-stepping the ‘joy’ of marriage and motherhood, leaving millions of men to cope with managing their fragile emotional landscape without the constant buffer provided by the women in their lives. The emotional scaffolding that held cis-hetero intimacy together is collapsing.

The understanding of power and consent become central to the next phase of this journey.

Women are increasingly demanding emotional reciprocity, communication, and accountability. For those accustomed to entitlement, this shift can feel destabilising and many will choose to opt out and find safer avenues that need less ‘work’ and have the seductive appeal of a programmed desired outcome.

After all, AI companions do not demand emotional growth or accountability. Sex robots never have a headache or expect you to contribute to the housekeeping. There is no need to unlearn entitlement, no risk of rejection, no need for vulnerability. Intimacy can be programmed to be permanently consensual and perpetually available.

But if power is never negotiated, if consent is never required, if emotional literacy is not expected, then digital intimacies are not just a bridge but a bypass, and where does that road lead?

As humanity seriously contemplates long-term space travel and settlement in other planets, it is crucial to recognise that life beyond Earth will not simply be a technological challenge but also a deeply emotional and relational one. Harsh environments, radiation exposure, low gravity, limited resources and extreme isolation will make traditional human reproduction risky in every possible way. Not just biologically but also psychologically and logistically. Space colonies may prioritise stability, predictability and risk-minimisation over romantic chaos. No Romeo and Juliet can be tolerated on Mars or a DDLJ-level drama on a Voyager mission travelling outside the solar system. Digital or artificial partners do not get jealous, abandon missions or destabilise small, closed ecosystems.

In this context digital intimacies and reproduction through robot wombs may come to be seen as the higher and safer means. A new social contract is looming where intimacy is being decoupled from reproduction and reproduction decoupled from a personal physical/biological interface (both of which already exist through adoption and IVF to some extent).
This raises a deeper evolutionary question – what will happen to our species which evolved and survived only because we created emotional bonds and sustained life through attachments of family, tribe and other kin?

Mammals and humans evolved beyond reptilian survival instincts and developed attachments. Our nervous systems and hormonal systems are deeply wired for bonding. If intimacy becomes increasingly digital and reproduction increasingly artificial, what happens to this foundational core? Will digital intimacies be enough to fill that endless black hole of desire and want that we are capable of generating at an individual and community level?

Of course, not ALL humans will make the shift (hopefully only the misogynistic and misanthropic billionaires!) But in a society where many adults meet their emotional and sexual needs through non-human means, what will become of children? They may inhabit a world where deep, exclusive, long-term attachment between co-parenting adults is no longer the norm. What healthy relationship models will they grow up with? How will they make sense of a world which runs contrary to everything their mind and heart are wired to seek as safe and comforting and regular? What will be the result of such a dissonance and what long-term disconnect trauma will they carry along into adulthood?

Not to sound like a Cassandra foretelling doom, because humans have evolved and survived many planet-level catastrophes and we will probably do ok … but it is just a question to consider.

Long before love, longing or intimacy existed, life had solved the problem of multiplication simply by division! The earliest organisms reproduced asexually, splitting themselves in two or more and creating copies. No courtship, no mating rituals, no consent, no emotional entanglement.

Sexual reproduction arrived a couple of billion years ago. It then depended on an exchange between two entities. This biological shift needed the dance between competition and cooperation, attraction and rejection, vulnerability and risk. Sex is so important because survival depends on it. With mammals the act of sexual reproduction became entangled with emotion and pair-bonding in order to offer the best chance of survival and care for their offspring.

In recent eras sex has been separated from survival in many ways and become regulated, feared, commodified and controlled. A quote attributed to Oscar Wilde says, “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.”

Power determines who is allowed to desire, who must repress, who is chosen, who can consent and who is cast aside or silenced. Power decides whose pleasure matters, whose reproduction is encouraged (or even made compulsory), and whose is punished.
In this age of digital intimacies, a couple of billion years since sexual reproduction evolved, we no longer need two physical bodies, nor a human womb for sex or reproduction, nor a covenant of commitment.

And so the evolutionary story comes full circle from cells that split to survive, to humans who must now decide whether intimacy, in all its mess and meaning, still remains essential to who we are.

Maybe the future does not demand a binary choice any more than gender or sexuality do. Perhaps the challenge is to ensure that even as intimacy becomes digital and reproduction artificial, the core ingredients of attachment, caregiving, vulnerability, negotiation and emotional presence remain sacred technologies of their own.

After all, whether it is through pets, plants, children, kin, fandoms, AI or robots, what humans have been doing forever is finding a container to share their love and looking for a mirror to reciprocate that love back to them.

The Singularity is a hypothetical point in time when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in changes to human civilisation that are impossible to comprehend or predict.

The future may well be a hybrid space where we can engage with digital intimacies in a healthy and fulfilling way while ensuring spaces and capacities for safe and healthy negotiated human relationships, communities and kinships.

If we are to retain who we are, then these technological leaps need to be guided and contained by ethical and philosophical structures and accountability, and not merely by money and markets.

After all, the longing for belonging, the deep core yearning to be heard and to be held, the hunger to be seen and witnessed by someone who ‘gets’ you, that remains unchanged.

Cover image by Alex Knight on Unsplash