Six in a Bed: The Future of Love -- From Sex Dolls and Avatars to Polyamory

Love is the most important and intense experience of one's life. It pushes us to elation, to heartbreak, to sing for joy and sob in disappointment. Connecting in this way to others is an essential quality of being human: without love, we don't learn and develop properly as children and we don't flourish as adults - in short, we're starved of what we need.

But love is on the verge of monumental change. Not only is the impact of AI and robotics set to revolutionise how we relate to each other, but sex robots are already on the market, drugs are being developed which can make you fall in love, polyamory is gaining ground and debates about whether more than two people should be able legally to get married are heating up. At the same time, there is an increasing number of people who have decided to stay single and who go by the name of sologamists.

The futures anthropologist Roanne van Voorst spent three years researching love's fluid landscape and immersing herself in today's latest trends to gain insight into the human of tomorrow. She cultivated a virtual friendship, hired a rentable friend and an erotic masseuse, shared a bed with sex dolls and flirted with artificial intelligence. She dated and danced in a virtual world, spoke to polyamorists, sologamists, sex workers, pansexuals, asexuals, heterosexuals, homosexuals, men, women, and people who don't accept the binary gender label. She wanted to know how changes to love are changing our species. This book is her brilliantly engaging answer.

Roanne van Voorst is a futures-anthropologist, writer, columnist, and president of the Dutch Future Society. She is currently assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam.