How Sex, Bombs and Burgers Shaped our World

Porn companies jump on new technologies for a number of reasons: One is to expand their distribution, the other is to get their products to people as easily as possible because they’ve historically been at odds with courts and regulators and that sort of thing, but I think the most interesting reason why porn companies jump on new technologies is that governments and regulators are often hesitant to rule on new technologies because they don’t want to discourage people from investing. So what happens is that porn companies jump on them while they’re enjoying their regulatory holidays.
I had never made the connection between Google video chat and Skype and Internet porn. As you point out, Internet porn pioneered this idea of video chatting.
A lot of people, no matter what you tell them, consider porn’s contribution to technology a myth, and that’s largely because it’s a very private, secretive industry so it’s hard to prove the numbers. I wrote a blog post today trying to assess the financial state of the industry, and it’s impossible to do because of the secrecy, and not just with the porn producers. A lot of mainstream businesses are also in on it — hotel chains, ISPs, search engines, phone providers. They’re all getting a cut of people looking for and watching pornography, but none of these companies disclose that.
Why is technological progress so tied to the military? You write quite a lot about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA], a military program that created a lot of new technology.
The best way to answer that is to paraphrase Vint Cerf, who is one of the fathers of the Internet. He told me that, for most of its existence, DARPA was an agency that was interested in long-term projects and they invested in a lot of far-out ideas. For example, I saw something today that says they’re working on how to control time warp. These are the kinds of ideas DARPA is willing to fund because they know that sometimes there’s a long-term payoff. The corporate world is increasingly the complete opposite because over the last decade companies have been becoming more and more interested in short-term results.
But DARPA has shrunk significantly from what it used to be, and Obama just cut the Pentagon’s budget. Do you think the source of innovation has shifted away from the military towards the private sphere?
It’s funny because people associate the military-industrial complex subconsciously with the Cold War. In fact, the industry and military have never been closer, and I think it’s been a psychological shift in the way things work in the U.S. Since 9/11, it’s almost become patriotic for companies to work hand-in-hand with the military. So many of Google’s products, for example, come from the military or have been developed on military dollars, like Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Translate. Siri came out of a DARPA program called the Personalized Assistant That Learns. But in some ways, the military is looking to the consumer world a lot more than it used to. You read reports of the military buying a ton of of Android phones and developing a bunch of apps to use for them. There is a lot more borrowing from the consumer world; it’s not as one-directional as it used to be.
That seems like a good thing, that our technology is less dependent on the death of other human beings.
You can actually see the same trend in business. It used to be that the corporate IT department would buy early technology and then it would filter onto the consumer world. Now it’s the reverse. When the iPhone came out, a lot of people who worked for companies said, “I don’t want this jinky monochrome BlackBerry, I want an iPhone.”
You talk about robotics in the book as well. Toyota has tried for a long time to create marketable robots, particularly in the healthcare field, but as you argue in the book, it seems like military robots are the ones most likely to dominate the consumer robotics market.
These Japanese carmakers make really amazing robots, but a lot of it is about show as opposed to function, whereas military robots are the exact opposite. Toyota has really cool robots that can play violins and soccer, but these things cost millions of dollars, and do you really want a robot to play soccer with? I’d rather have a robot that cleans my toilet. That’s where the American-style robots are coming from. One of the bestselling home robots is the Roomba from iRobot, and they’re a company that cut its teeth building explosives disposal robots. The thing is, when you say robot, people think C-3PO or Commander Data from “Star Trek,” but humanoid robots are such a small sliver of overall robotics. Robotic technology is bleeding into everything we see around us so that we don’t even notice. There are cameras now that, if you point them at someone, won’t take a picture until the person smiles. Our houses are also becoming robots — some can adjust their power consumption based on if anybody’s home or not.
As military budgets shrink and the center of global power shifts away from U.S., do you think the importance of military innovation will decrease?
I think the appeal of sex, bombs and burgers are universal. I think they’re going to drive innovation regardless of where you are. It’s happening. China is already the world’s second biggest spender on its military, and it’s going to start reaping the same benefits consumer-wise that the U.S. did. Pornography is technically banned in China and yet, according to the estimates I’ve seen, it’s already the world’s biggest consumer of it. India is the world’s biggest growing market for fast food restaurants. Over a long enough timeline, such places are going to see the same benefits from these negative needs, but, then again, there may be an element of American exceptionalism that nobody else can match.