Autonomous vehicles are the future for sex workers

A paper in the field of transport and tourism, that was recently published, gives an interesting view on the future of sex work. Debbie Hopkins and Scott Cohen describe their vision on the effect that autonomous vehicles will have on the way they will be intimate.

Toerism

Hopkins’ and Cohen’s paper is mainly about the effect of autonomous cars on tourism.

“It’s only a natural conclusion that sex in autonomous vehicles will become a phenomenon”, Cohen – professor tourism at the University of Surrey – told The Washington Post. Sex while driving in such a car will become a hip trend. And once that is a fact, it will be a matter of time before you can have payed sex dates in an autonomous vehicle.

Hopkins and Cohen describe how hotel rooms that are rented by the hour, will likely be replaced by autonomous vehicles.

Not new

Still, these predictions aren’t exactly new. In a (Dutch) blogpost here on NBRPlaza from 2016, we already explained how sex in (semi) automatic cars plays to peoples fantasies. That blogpost is based on the predictions of Barrie Kirk, from the’ Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre Of Excellence’. According to that article, sex in this kind of vehicle is not only inevitable, but could also lead to (traffic) issues. For the time being, self driving cars aren’t safe enough to assume they are able to drive fully autonomously. The driver still needs to keep his eyes on the road. Several accidents have happened, because drivers mistake ‘auto assist’ for ‘self driving’.

But when cars will actually become fully self operating (perhaps even within 10 years), we will most certainly be having sex in them.

Mobile sex and the future of the Amsterdam Red Light District

Hopkins and Cohen speculate that autonomous vehicles will become the place where couples seek some privacy or where sex workers will offer their services.

“It is just a small leap to imagine Amsterdam’s Red Light District ‘on the move”, they say in their paper.

It is not inconceivable that exhibitionists will show themselves to passengers in other autonomous cars. And Tinder or Grinder dates might just show up in self driving cars. Het is even imaginable that there will be mobile BDSM playcars; self driving cars, furbished in leather or latex, that will pick up kinky people for an exciting drive.

There’s no use in denying that this development will continue. But in the development of these autonomous vehicles there must be attention to human behavior and sex is an important part of that.