Better loving through technology: a day at the sex-toy hackathon

Sound-controlled vibrators, 3D-printed clitorises and ‘Michael Gove’ as a safe word: coders and inventors try to find the future of sex in south London

In Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine, a book about transhumanists attempting to meld their bodies with technology to solve the problem of death, he talks about cyborgs.

When the term was first used in a 1960 scientific paper, cybernetic organisms were a solution to the human body being unsuited to space exploration; if the bodies of astronauts and technology were integrated, they could function in hostile environments.

But arriving as it did during the Soviet threat of nuclear annihilation, the idea of the cyborg swiftly became transformed into a war machine. It’s not unfair to say that when humans invent a new technology, they will generally find some way to kill each other with it or have sex with it: they can either destroy the world or save their own one.

Read more at The Guardian.