Artificial Intimacy Erodes Autonomy

Some of the most expensive things on the internet are free.

Pornography is an obvious example. Much of it costs nothing to access. No ticket. No subscription. Often, not even an account. From an economic perspective, the transaction can appear almost nonexistent.

But money may be the least valuable thing being exchanged. The transaction isn't simply monetary. It's the loss of one of our most important treasures: attention, peace of mind, and our dignity.

Every click costs these. And these all have derivatives.

An hour can become sleep, conversation, exercise, reading, work, boredom, reflection, or simply an hour spent alone with your own mind. More importantly, where we repeatedly direct our attention can influence where it becomes easiest to direct it again. What begins as something we choose when sexually aroused can also become something we reach for when bored, lonely, anxious, frustrated, or simply unwilling to sit still.

Now this isn't necessarily to say pornography is evil. It's not. But it does raise a question about what happens when we repeatedly tether our attention and peace of mind to something outside ourselves. There is a difference between choosing pleasure and gradually becoming dependent on a particular stimulus to escape discomfort. The first exercises autonomy. The second can begin to narrow it.

This is where dignity enters the conversation.

I don't mean dignity as purity or sexual morality. I mean something closer to self-government: the ability to decide what deserves our attention, to tolerate discomfort without always needing to escape it, and to remain the author of our own behavior. External circumstances can humiliate us, but they cannot entirely determine that inner relationship with ourselves. When we surrender control over our attention, we risk surrendering some of that authorship too.

That is why I think the conventional debate over pornography begins too late

We usually ask whether pornography changes sexual expectations, damages relationships, or substitutes for physical intimacy. Those are very important questions. But they assume that the “real thing” pornography is replacing is sex.

What if it is replacing something much larger?

I encountered an interesting way of thinking about this through Michio Kushi's concept of artificialization: the broader replacement or transformation of direct human experiences through increasingly artificial ones. His concept of artificialization begins in 4 different stages: the bionation, the psychonation, the ultrapsychonation, and genetic engineering. For the purpose of this article, I'll be focusing more on the psychonation because that's effectively what pornography falls under: it shifts human intimacy from a physical reality to a digitally and electronically mediated psychological experience that primarily engages neural pathways, mental imagery, and behavioral conditioning. Kushi developed the idea in a very different intellectual context, and it shouldn't be mistaken for a scientific theory of pornography. I simply find it useful as a question.

In consideration of the psychonation and pornography, the first main question we encounter is what happens when we separate a desirable sensation from the difficult process that traditionally produced it?

Consider sweetness. For most of human history, intensely sweet food was relatively difficult to obtain. Modern food production can isolate, concentrate, and deliver sweetness cheaply and almost instantly.

Social media performs a different separation. Recognition once generally required another person actually knowing us. A notification can provide a small signal of recognition without the relationship that historically produced it.

Even generative AI may perform another. A companion can now be designed to respond immediately, remember our preferences, affirm us, and never become impatient unless it is programmed to.

Pornography fits uneasily but importantly into the same pattern. It separates sexual stimulation from many of the conditions traditionally surrounding sexual intimacy. Another person has preferences. Another person gets tired. Another person can misunderstand you, disagree with you, reject you, or need something when you would rather they did not. Intimacy requires some combination of patience, communication, vulnerability, compromise, and reciprocity.

That does not automatically make the screen harmful. Books, photographs, films, and phone calls all mediate experiences. Artificiality itself cannot be the problem.

The important difference may be what gets removed.

Technology is extraordinarily good at eliminating friction.

We celebrate this when navigation eliminates getting lost, search engines eliminate hours spent locating information, or medical technology eliminates unnecessary suffering.

But we rarely ask whether every form of friction is actually a defect.

Having to consider another person's desires is friction.

Even another person's autonomy can become friction if our only metric is how efficiently our own desires are satisfied.

Pornography can offer something reality cannot: near-total control over the experience. Content can be searched, skipped, accelerated, replaced, personalized, and abandoned instantly. Novelty can arrive with another click.

A human being cannot—and should not—compete on those terms.

If immediate satisfaction is the metric, reality is badly designed.

But perhaps immediate satisfaction is the wrong metric.

This is where the artificialization of intimacy becomes more interesting to me.

Imagine someone reaches for pornography because they are sexually aroused. The substitution is straightforward.

But imagine they reach for it because they are bored.

The scientific evidence here requires care. Pornography use and problematic pornography use are not interchangeable, and researchers themselves continue to debate definitions and measurement. Not everyone who consumes pornography experiences impaired control or meaningful harm.

Among people with problematic pornography use, however, research has identified associations with factors including stress, avoidance, coping styles, loneliness, craving, and difficulties regulating emotion. Experimental research has also examined attentional bias toward sexual stimuli and difficulties shifting attention away from them. These findings do not prove a simple causal story in which pornography destroys attention or creates loneliness. They do suggest that, for some users, pornography can become entangled with how uncomfortable internal states are managed.

The concern is not simply that someone spends thirty minutes watching pornography instead of spending those thirty minutes doing something “productive.” Human beings are allowed to waste time. A life optimized into uninterrupted productivity sounds miserable.

The deeper question is what happens when one particular form of stimulation becomes an increasingly automatic answer to discomfort.

Boredom ordinarily asks us to find something to do, or sometimes to do nothing.

Loneliness asks something much harder of us: reach outward, risk awkwardness, maintain relationships, or learn how to tolerate solitude.

Stress may require rest, exercise, conversation, reflection, or addressing whatever produced the stress in the first place.

None of these responses is immediate. None is guaranteed to work.

A sufficiently compelling digital substitute offers another possibility:

That distinction, between resolution and interruption, may be one of the most important in understanding artificialization.

This is why describing online pornography as “free” misses the more interesting economics.

And unlike five dollars, an hour of attention produces downstream effects.

Attention compounds into expertise when directed toward practice.

It becomes intimacy when repeatedly directed toward another person.

It becomes knowledge when sustained through a difficult book.

It becomes physical ability through training.

It becomes creativity when boredom lasts long enough for the mind to wander somewhere unexpected.

It can even become peace of mind when we develop the ability to experience an uncomfortable thought without immediately needing something to replace it.

That does not mean every minute must generate a return. Rest, entertainment, sex, and purposelessness are themselves parts of a good life. The danger begins when we lose the distinction between choosing an experience because we value it and reaching for one because we have become increasingly unwilling to experience the absence of stimulation.

The most consequential price of pornography, for some users, therefore may not appear on a credit-card statement.

Another fifteen because I do not want to start something difficult.

The individual transaction seems trivial. The accumulated pattern may not be.

There is an obvious objection to everything I have argued so far.

Perhaps pornography is simply an easy target.

People have always escaped discomfort. We overeat, gossip, drink, gamble, daydream, binge television, scroll social media, play video games, and procrastinate. Many people consume pornography without experiencing serious problems. And even where pornography use and poorer outcomes appear together, causation can run in multiple directions. A lonely person may use pornography more frequently rather than pornography having made that person lonely.

The evidence on sexual outcomes itself should make us cautious. A recent meta-analysis covering 41 studies and more than 70,000 participants found an overall negative association between pornography use and sexual satisfaction, but the correlation was very small. Research on problematic pornography use also remains complicated by differing definitions and measures.

So “pornography is destroying intimacy” would be both scientifically careless and philosophically boring.

The more interesting possibility is that pornography exposes a vulnerability that extends far beyond pornography.

We are building an economy increasingly capable of detecting uncomfortable human states and offering immediate ways to interrupt them.

None of these technologies is inherently bad. Many are extraordinarily useful.

But collectively, they create a strange new possibility: a person can move through increasingly large portions of life without remaining uncomfortable for very long.

And I am not sure that is entirely progress.

Reality has an enormous competitive disadvantage.

Friendship requires scheduling around another person's life. Love exposes us to rejection. Learning requires confusion. Fitness requires discomfort. Creativity requires failed attempts. Conversation requires occasionally being bored by what someone else wants to say. Intimacy requires encountering another consciousness that stubbornly refuses to behave like an extension of our own.

And that may be why the question of artificialization cannot be reduced to whether artificial experiences feel good or bad. Of course they can feel good. If they did not, they would pose little philosophical problem.

The question is whether the substitute begins training us to expect from reality the conveniences that only the substitute can provide.

Pornography makes this tension unusually visible because human sexuality involves desire meeting another person's autonomy. But the same question is becoming harder to ignore elsewhere.

What happens when an AI companion is more patient than a friend?

When an algorithm knows what entertains us better than we do?

When a digital world rewards us more reliably than the physical one?

When every uncomfortable silence can be filled before we have to discover what might emerge from it?

At some point, the problem is no longer that the simulation fails to resemble reality.

The problem may be that it becomes better at satisfying the metric we chose.

This returns me to a question I keep encountering in healthcare, technology, and public pol