Questioning Sex #3: If AI Poses an Existential Threat, Can Upgrading Our SEX OS Save Us From the Robots?
Can our uniquely human capacity for sexual ecstasy counteract the threat of dehumanization posed by AI? Is our body the last refuge from artificial mind? Will we find the answer to living with AI hidden between our legs?
I. J. Weinstock is the author of the fantasy series THE SECRET SEX LIFE OF ANGELS — an epic quest exploring the mystery we call “sex.” This article is adapted from his new book, OUR SECRET SEX LIFE: The Key to Humanity’s Destiny.
The rise of civilization is the story of humans creating technologies — language, tools, agriculture, and so on — that helped us adapt, colonize, and ultimately conquer Nature. We reshaped the natural world in our image and now live in an increasingly human-made one. But our technologies not only transformed Nature, they also transformed us.
The AI (Artificial Intelligence) Revolution is the most significant transformation in human civilization since the Agricultural Revolution.
In the 17th century, French philosopher Rene Descartes elevated our capacity to reason as the defining characteristic of a human being — “I think, therefore I am.” But we’ve now invented machines that can think better than we can. So what are we now? And what will we be in an increasingly AI-generated world?
Ironically, as technology provides more and more answers, it also poses the ultimate existential question: What is a human being?
The Dehumanizing Dilemma of AI
As we spend more and more time online, we’re beginning to discover the unintended consequences of virtual life and the dark side of our digital technology.
The media is full of dread about the destructive potential of AI: from tech pundits and pioneers warning that humanity is at an existential inflection point; to pop culture monstor metaphors like “Frankenstein” and the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice;” to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s attempt at gallows humor, “I’m not looking forward to servitude under my iPhone.”
AI has its own logical imperatives, its algorithmic DNA. As we adapt to our brave new AI world, we’re being reshaped in its image. Do we risk becoming algorithmic versions of ourselves and losing some essential part of our humanity?
After all, love is not logical. Hope and faith are irrational. Bravery and courage often defy reason. Will such essential emotions be gradually transformed in an AI-powered world into something unrecognizable, something less than human?
Mirror, Mirror In My Hand
One of the unintended consequences of our new digital technology is an epidemic of screen addiction and its many destructive side effects. One of them is a lack of face-to-face contact that, especially in the young, may breed a lack of empathy that psychologists warn could result in an increasingly sociopathic society.
As our screens mirror back to us an endless kaleidoscope of enchanting and fascinating reflections, we’re becoming increasingly lost in this digital Hall of Mirrors.
Lovers stroll along beautiful beaches, yet rather than savoring the moment and each other, they remain glued to their devices. Families sit around the dinner table and, instead of talking to each other, fixate on their screens, oblivious of those around them. Increasingly, we spend more time with our digital devices than with the flesh and blood people in our lives.
Technology has allowed us to outsource many aspects of our lives. In our AI-enabled world, robots drive our cars, fly our planes, and grow our food. Chatbots do our thinking, Google our remembering, apps our socializing and dating, and drones our fighting. How much more of our humanity will we outsource to AI? And, more importantly, what will be left?
The Narcissus Syndrome
One of the threats AI poses is expressed by the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus. It could be a cautionary tale for today.
Beware the fate of Narcissus! When he looked into a pool of water and beheld his reflection, he grew so enchanted that he fell hopelessly in love. Trapped by his fascination with himself, Narcissus neither ate nor drank and eventually died.
Like Narcissus, we are becoming so enchanted by the technological wonders of our brave new AI world, so hypnotized by our virtual reflections, that our very humanity is at risk!
Beware the Narcissus Syndrome!
If Screen Life is the Question, Could Our Sex Life Be the Answer?
Our increasingly AI-powered world of software and screens requires us to develop an inner ecstatic technology to balance the outer digital one. It’s time to rediscover the “wetware” of embodied sexual ecstasy that defines us as human beings.
Having uncoupled sex from reproduction, we humans are an evolutionary exception. Our all-the-time, any-time hyper-sexuality (which I discuss in my new book) is more fundamental and consequential than we realize. It’s a defining aspect of our humanity.
Tragically, patriarchal and religious oppression have gone to great lengths over millennia to hide this fundamental truth from us. What if the answer to the existential question posed by AI is hidden where we’ve been told not to look — between our legs?!
To understand what that means (so we can more effectively navigate our AI future), a look back to our ancient past will help us awaken from the Patriarchal Matrix.
In the Beginning, Goddess Created the Heavens and the Earth
Our patriarchal civilization has kept us ignorant of the rich history of female-centered religion that humanity celebrated for thousands of years. Archeological evidence confirms that our earliest belief systems worshipped a Goddess as the Supreme Creator. Though called by different names — Inanna, Ishtar, and Isis, to name a few — the Great Goddess was worshipped throughout the ancient world.
If we weren’t so immersed in Western Civilization’s “matrix,” we’d see how obvious and natural it would be to envision the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe as female. Woman bleeds with periodic regularity like the moon, ripens with pregnancy like a fruit, gives birth to new life, and then nurtures that life with milk from her breasts. Magical. Miracle. Mother of Us All.
And the mystery at the heart of all these miracles of life is sex, which these Goddess-worshipping civilizations revered as the Original Blessing.
The Goddess is Worshipped Through Her “Sexual Mysteries”
The difference between ancient Goddess-worshipping civilizations and our own is not just their veneration of a female deity.
In Sumer (the biblical Babylon), they celebrated the Epic of Gilgamesh written on stone tablets pre-dating the Bible. It’s a record of the Goddess sending her High Priestess into the wilderness to sexually initiate a wild man named Enki and thus raise him from bestiality to humanity.
Since these ancient civilizations viewed sex as the Original Blessing that evolved humanity from bestiality, engaging in holy sexual communion with a priestess, a representative of the Goddess, was an act of religious devotion and played a central role in the temple worship and sacred rituals of the Great Goddess.
Temple priestesses were revered as healers of the sick and considered seers, but their primary function was to teach the Sexual Mysteries of the Original Blessing, and so dispense the Goddess’s “grace” through sexual worship.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s AI’s answer to my query — ”What were the “sexual mysteries” that were taught and explored in the ancient Goddess-worshipping temples?”
ChatGPT: The ancient goddess-worshipping temples, such as those dedicated to Aphrodite in Greece or Ishtar in Mesopotamia, were associated with various rituals and practices, including those related to sexuality and fertility. While the exact details and practices may vary across different cultures and time periods, here are some aspects commonly associated with the “sexual mysteries” taught and explored in these temples:
— Sacred sexuality: These temples often embraced the concept of sacred or divine sexuality, where sexual acts were seen as a way to connect with the divine and tap into spiritual energies. Sexual pleasure and expression were celebrated as a natural and integral part of human experience.
— Ritualized ceremonies: Temples conducted ceremonies and rituals that involved sexual symbolism or acts. These ceremonies aimed to honor and invoke the goddess’s presence, as well as to promote fertility, abundance, and the renewal of life forces.
— Initiations and education: Temples provided teachings and initiations to individuals seeking spiritual growth and connection through sexuality. Initiates would receive guidance and instruction on the sacred and mystical aspects of sexuality, exploring practices and techniques that were believed to enhance pleasure, vitality, and spiritual awakening.
— Healing and empowerment: Temples served as spaces for sexual healing and empowerment. They offered support for individuals seeking to heal trauma, explore their desires, or reclaim their sexuality in a safe and sacred environment. These practices aimed to foster personal growth, self-acceptance, and liberation.
— Connection with nature and cycles: Temples often emphasized the connection between sexuality, fertility, and the cycles of nature. Sexual rituals and practices were aligned with seasonal and agricultural cycles, acknowledging the interplay between human sexuality and the fertility of the earth.
Paternity = Property = Power = Patriarchy
The Agricultural Revolution transformed our hunter-gatherer, nomadic, and egalitarian lifestyle into a farming, sedentary, and competitive one in which we planted crops, domesticated animals, and accumulated property. It also sowed the seeds of Patriarchy and drove men to acquire progeny and power. It ultimately transformed the relationship between men and women, especially how men related to sex.
Historian Gerda Lerner maintains that because the determination of paternity was essential to amassing property and power, men’s control over women’s sexuality and reproduction is both the fundamental cause and ultimate result of Patriarchy.
Merlin Stone’s book, When God Was A Woman, zeroes in on the driving force behind the monumental changes that resulted in Patriarchy. “It is only with a certain knowledge of paternity that a patrilineal system can be maintained.”
For men to acquire progeny, property, and power, they had to ascertain paternity. If they wanted to know whose child a woman bore, they needed to control her sexually.
The “Queen of Heaven” Becomes the “Whore of Babylon”
As the Patriarchy grew, men gradually consolidated their rule over women and their offspring by rewriting society’s belief systems (religion) to diminish women’s status and justify their dominance.
The Great Goddess was replaced by the new male God of the Bible. The biblical prohibition against eating the “forbidden fruit” in the Garden of Eden began the demonization of sex and the desecration of the Original Blessing as the Original Sin.
Replacing the Goddess with a God had profound earthly consequences. By demonizing the Goddess’s Sexual Mysteries, sex went from a sacred and holy re-enactment of the Original Blessing that plumbs the mystery of creation and invokes the Divine to something that was for the pleasure of men and the procreation of their sons. This shift from Goddess to God redefined sex, degraded the status of women, and transformed the structures of society.
As children, we all learned the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But Western Civilization’s creation myth — with its inverted logic in which the first woman (Eve) is “birthed” from a man (Adam’s rib) — was a veiled attack on Goddess worship. Eve is seduced by a Serpent (symbol of the Goddess) to eat the “forbidden fruit” (Sexual Mysteries) and is ultimately blamed for Humanity’s Fall and expulsion from Paradise.
When the Goddess was banished from Heaven and slandered as the Whore of Babylon, the Original Blessing became the Original Sin for which women were blamed and forever after cursed with subservience on Earth. From then on, women’s sexuality was controlled by men to attain paternity certainty and maintain the patriarchal project. Meanwhile, the Sexual Mysteries of the Original Blessing were lost and forgotten.
We’ve inherited the upside-down civilization this creation myth generated. But our male-defined, penis-centric world tells only half the story.
Women’s Sexual Gift
Men may be physically stronger than women, but according to both ancient myth and modern science, women have a sexual gift.
Greek mythology says it this way. The God, Zeus, and his wife, the Goddess Hera, were arguing about who had more pleasure in sex — men or women? So they asked the blind prophet, Tiresias, who’d been transformed into a woman for seven years. Since he’d experienced sex as both a man and a woman, he’d know.
Tiresias answered their question, “Of ten parts, a man enjoys only one.”
According to ancient myth, a woman experiences 10x more pleasure than a man.
Modern biology seems to agree. Our genitals embody the naked truth of our sexuality. A man’s penis has to multi-task between procreation, pleasure, and plumbing. By contrast, a woman’s clitoris, though much smaller than the penis, has twice as many nerve endings. But unlike the penis, the clitoris doesn’t have to double as plumbing. The clitoris has only one function — a woman’s pleasure.
In her book, Vagina: A Cultural History, Naomi Wolf suggests that the female orgasm is more complex than the male orgasm due to women’s more extensive pelvic neural wiring. Nature has evolved women to experience powerful and potentially transcendent orgasms.
This sexual gift may explain why women priestesses served in the ancient Goddess-worshipping temples. Women have access to the Sexual Mysteries of the Original Blessing in ways men don’t. But once Patriarchy hacked our SEX OS, that access was lost.
Patriarchy’s male-defined, penis-centric world is increasingly out of balance with Nature. Men have run the world for millennia and brought civilization to the brink of disaster!
Feminist scholars believe that for women to be truly free, they must regain control over their sexuality. When women rediscover the Goddess’s Original Blessing and teach the Sexual Mysteries to their lovers, they’ll begin the healing of society. Perhaps, rediscovering a female-defined, vagina-and-clitoris-centric world might save us.
The “Root” of the Tree of Life is the “Source Code” of Society
In France, prehistoric caves contain 15,000-year-old images of male and female genitals. Why? It’s not because they liked porn. It’s because sex is the source, not only of progeny but of society.
Ancient civilizations like Egypt and Sumer revered the Original Blessing of sex as the “root” of the Tree of Life and understood that if the “root” from which civilization grows is damaged, the “fruit” will become bitter and ultimately poisoned.
Western Civilization is also built upon the idea that sex is significant, but in a distorted, shameful, almost demonic way, since it became the “Original Sin” responsible for the Fall of Man and our exile from the Garden of Eden.
If ancient civilizations revered sex as the “root of the Tree of Life,” a contemporary metaphor might be that sex is the “source code” for society. How we conceive of, feel about, and engage in sex shapes relations between men and women, dictates the dynamics of family, and ultimately influences the values and structures of society.
To continue the tech metaphor, if we think of sex as one of humanity’s “Operating Systems,” our SEX OS has been corrupted by religious “bugs,” infected by patriarchal cultural “viruses,” and distorted by shame-based “malware.” Simply put, our SEX OS has been hacked!
Since sex is so fundamental and consequential, the “story” we tell ourselves about this defining aspect of our humanity determines the kind of society in which we live. Sex creates not only new generations but also shapes civilizations.
A civilization that believes sex is the “Original Blessing” will be very different than a civilization that believes sex is the “Original Sin.” After millennia of patriarchal and religious sexual oppression, we suffer from collective ignorance and unconscious shame about this defining aspect of our humanity.
Upgrading Our SEX OS May Be Humanity’s Last Refuge from the Machine
To counteract the potentially dehumanizing effects of AI, we have to trust in the evolutionary wisdom of our uniquely human sexuality.
As we slide down the technological rabbit hole into the frictionless virtual world of AI, we need to restore our full humanity by upgrading our SEX OS. To do that requires healing the collective trauma of our inherited Original Sin-sourced sexual shame. Only by lifting the Curse of Eden and rehabilitating our hacked SEX OS can we access our Original Blessing.
Once we upgrade our hacked SEX OS, we’ll activate the inner “wetware” of our uniquely human ecstatic technology, rediscover the Goddess’s Original Blessing, and realize that our hacked SEX OS has reduced us to “sexual primitives rubbing two sticks together to make fire” when we have the potential to sexually “split the atom.” Achieving mastery, we’ll begin to rediscover the Sexual Mysteries — for example, that sexual energy can be a medicine and that orgasm isn’t the end but the beginning.
Living increasingly inside technology’s “glass cage,” lost in the infinite reflections of AI’s digital Hall of Mirrors, we must learn to cultivate and master our uniquely human capacity for sexual ecstasy. In an increasingly AI-generated world, the physical celebration of love and being alive may be the only thing that keeps us truly human.
SEX 2.0 Can Save Us From the Robots
Breaking free of our digital bondage to AI will require a deep dive into our flesh and embodied humanity. Rediscovering humanity’s unique capacity for sexual ecstasy will awaken us from the digital matrix so we can successfully regulate and live with AI.
SEX 2.0 will not only help counteract our screen-induced, empathy-reduced epidemic of sociopathy, it will also inoculate us against the Narcissus Syndrome. Cultivating and harnessing the “inner fire” of our life force through an upgraded SEX OS will shut our eyes to the digital reflections which enchant, fascinate, and ultimately addict us.
We’ll have to look away from our screens to gaze deeply into a lover’s eyes.
We’ll have to put down our devices so our hands can lovingly touch one another.
We’ll have to close our eyes to access and activate our inner ecstatic wetware.
Upgrading our hacked SEX OS, rediscovering the ancient Sexual Mysteries of the Original Blessing, and exploring our sexual potential may ultimately be humanity’s last refuge from the machine. As strange as it sounds, SEX 2.0 might save us from the robots.
Postscript
French philosopher Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity… We shall harness the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
Fire was the technology that unlocked human civilization. What will be unlocked when we harness the “inner fire” of our sexuality? How ironic would it be if the threat of AI catalyzed the next step in our evolution?
_________
I. J. Weinstock is the author of THE SECRET SEX LIFE OF ANGELS series — an epic quest exploring the mystery we call “sex.” This article is adapted from his nonfiction book, OUR SECRET SEX LIFE: The Key to Humanity’s Destiny.
I. J. Weinstock’s recent articles on sex and society include:
— ”Questioning Sex #2: Is a ‘Pussy’ By Any Other Name the Same?”
— ”Questioning Sex #1: WTF Is It?”
— ”Women’s Sexual Empowerment Can Save the World!”
— “A Conversation with OpenAI’s ChatGPT About Artificial Intelligence & Sex”
— “A New ‘Theory of Relativity’ Could Shake Up the World Again. But This Time It’s About Sex!”
— “Is Sex the Missing Piece of the Puzzle?”
— “Did Jesus Have a Secret Sex Life?”
— “It’s The Sex, Stupid! The Sexual Undercurrents of Recent and Future Politics”
For more information: www.IJWeinstock.com
CONTACT: dreamasterbooks@gmail.com