VR Porn Will Make Human Actors Obsolete

Given the increase in the fidelity of virtual reality over the last few years, the ability to experience our fantasies is becoming ever more real. The genre through which that desire is sure to be most acutely focused is pornography, and a new report from Vice Motherboard predicts that the advent of VR sex will make traditional porn actors obsolete.

“A human won’t be able to compete in this world. A studio will be able to hire a porn actor for a thousand dollars or just rent the software and create one for less,” Ian Pearson, a senior futurologist at Futurizon, told Motherboard.

The future of VR porn is to effectively replicate the experience of being in a Star trek holodeck, and that process does not need humans, merely convincing simulations of them. As such, the porn industry is panicking, desperately wondering how it fits into this new future.

“As a porn star, you absolutely have to worry about your job in the current climate,” Cindy Gallop, founder of ‘real sex’ social site MakeLoveNotPorn, said. “Porn is so big that it has become conventional—and it’s tanking, much in the way that the music business and journalism did. Unless the porn industry is able to open up to innovation and creativity, it’s f***ed.”

Simulated people in pornographic VR scenarios have the potential to be malleable to the users’ will in real-time in a way that a recorded actor can never be. You can give a computer instructions and it will respond, an impossible feat to replicate with a human unless you have a live one-on-one session with the actor.

“If people actually want to participate in their sexual fantasies—and I think they do— it will eventually eliminate the role of the porn star as we know it,” Brian Shuster, CEO of virtual worlds website Red Light Center, explained.

In the meantime, VR porn will lean heavily on traditional methods of creating pornography, and that relies on real people. Technology, though, continues to progress, and it seems we are not too far from the point at which these people become redundant, both functionally and vocationally.