Welcome to the weird side of the internet again! That’s what you get for enabling auto-play…
In this piece I’d like to highlight just how much of our modern digital world owes its existence to porn. Why? Because it’s both funny and true. So to really figure out what porn has done for digital progress, we need to start at the beginning:
What have they done so far?
Long ago, in a little unknown country called the United States of America, the internet was born. This internet was unwieldy, slow, confusing and in desperate need of life support. The adult industry is one of the biggest reasons why the early internet retained enough users for its continued development by keeping people hooked and coming back for obvious reasons. They were the ones to pioneer streaming, pop-up ads, online transactions, tracking devices and are one of the reasons e-commerce is so large in the current day. They even were the driver for increasing the bandwidth of the internet to facilitate more porn, and all the other services benefited (Benes, 2013: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-porn-drives-innovation-in-tech-2013-7?international=true&r=US&IR=T).
What are they doing now?
The adult industry’s influence on innovation is less prominent nowadays due to its nature as the first to capitalize on technologies and trends. They do, however still contribute (Gross, 2010:http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/23/porn.technology/index.html)! Deep fakes, AI and haptic feedback aren’t innovations made by the porn industry specifically, but industry is the one driving their practical application far earlier than others.
- Deep fakes are already being used to fake celebreties for porn but the industry is advancing the tech regardless, and getting better all the time.
- AI is being tested to create an interactive porn experience which will likely be translated to other applications if succesful.
- Haptic feedback is being used to create sex toys that can accurately simulate sex between long distance partners or a porn video, but has multiple applications in interface and product design.
If someday Siri and Alexa become sentient, you can thank porn for that!
Hi Robert, First of all, I think it’s cool and brave that you bring up this topic on this type of forum! I believe that this type of industry can have a positive effect, such as entertainment and a stable revenue stream, but can also have a negative effect. I will zoom in a little further on the negative effects regarding the use of data in the porn industry.
Innovation is everywhere and so will it be present in the porn industry. For example, perhaps the next big frontier of pornography is virtual reality and many developers will now jump on this lucrative market. A chinees programmer based in Germany had identified over 100.000 porn actrices and linked them to their social media pages. It was claimed that the reason for this matching activity was to make others able to check whether their boy or girlfriend was active in porn video’s. This application was later deleted and the projects was cancelled. However, it made me acknowledge the the use of data and innovations could be both exciting and frightening. and not to mention all the data from site visitors that ends up with third parties. Some even claim that 94% of data collected on porn sites is sold to other companies. Not everyone can be stopped by strong regulations and date protection. I think using innovations to make porn more pleasant is fine. For example, the third bullet point in your post about making toys connected to long distance partners is and exciting and harmless idee. However, the use of data in porn industry should be addressed a little bit more carefully.
Norton, A. (2019). 5 Genuine Innovations in the Adult Industry. [online] SEXTECHGUIDE. Available at: https://sextechguide.com/gadgets/5-genuine-innovations-adult-industry/ [Accessed 18 Oct. 2019].
Medium. (2019). Facial Recognition for Porn Is Still a Terrible Idea. [online] Available at: https://towardsdatascience.com/facial-recognition-for-porn-is-still-a-terrible-idea-bb5dbb9c0281 [Accessed 18 Oct. 2019].