I don’t think looking at the past hundred year’s tech is the best way to predict the next hundred years. If we did that in 1895 we’d have been fools. I was only invoking TV to demonstrate how people thought it would be a fad that it wouldn’t catch on for various reasons, such as it being a flat square instead of reality. Meanwhile, years later we are glued to our idiot boxes, so that fad theory was proven false. All this shows is that we have the ability to mistake lasting and meaningful advances for empty fads, without knowing it, until after the fact.
But to look at TVs today or in the recent past and extrapolate “never” seems to me to be a serious fallacy, a serious weakness in your normally air tight approach. The advancements in tvs in two years, let alone 20, will be notable, in that it will indeed appear real and 3d. But the real advances will be in oculus tech, which I’ve had the pleasure to beta test. Soon the image in the oculus rift will be cinematic, not pixelated animation. One could, plausibly, sit across the table from a friend who lives thousands of miles away, hear the rosin in her throat, and make deep and lasting eye contact. With a flip of the switch they are now standing by a waterfall. It’s only a small leap to build touch into the scenario. If your argument is limited by your imagination of haptic suits, and you’re picturing them as a crude rubber sex toy, then surely you will have no problem avoiding this line of thinking as long as you want to. We can go in circles forever. I believe we are five years away from a plausible two-perosn sexual experience through oculus and haptics. Possibly three.
When you say “indistinguishable from real sex” it makes me think maybe you don’t have a whole lot of sex. You’re imagining it to be something it’s not. A lot of the actual sex people have isn’t indistinguishable from real sex, to put it lightly. And to suggest people can’t have an intimate friendship through virtual technology is absurd – I have felt more of a bond to the 11-pt font words glowing on my ILP screen than many people in the flesh.
I think you’re also forgetting that we already use high-tech haptic suits. They’re called bodies, and they are not magical. They are bio-machinery that will, inevitably, be extended and enhanced by virtual technology. It seems like you don’t make it a habit to read about future tech, and maybe you carry to the subject a bias against it, so you close your mind to it. But you have yet to show that you know the first thing about predictive tech trends, Moore’s law, haptic engineering, or any of the technologies I’m referencing. I think you’re hiding your head in the sand a bit.
Many guys I know don’t feel the burning desire to get laid, because they jerk off to porn. The effect is already taking place. It severely dampens the universal libido. Given the opportunity to have sex, they might take a pass, not worth the trouble. The smells and the pacing is just ultra slow and boring and too real. They’d rather eat a big bowl of chilly, cuddle up with their iPhone and fuck 20 different chicks before they cum and fall asleep safely alone. This trend will increase as technology becomes more vivid, more sensory inputs involved, and peer to peer, or even group connections become the new trend.
It may make sense to research how long it takes to create a social movement, find evidence that you can do this quickly. Even if you could, you only have about 20-30 years tops, so all the effort might be for naught, given the huge advantages in convenience, privacy, variation and safety that virtual sex could offer. I think we might want to switch it to a Sexocracy where virtually sex is funded by the state. There’s no reason to throw the baby/bathwater. The sexocracy in your version is an ice storm of profound eyes wide shut proportions, the brainchild of a severely numb heart, and you may lack the spectrum of experience and emotion to realize that it’s super icky and no women will ever agree to it.