By Todd Davis
Boys and Girls was a 2000 movie starring Claire Forlani and Freddie Prinze Jr. that explored relationships between the sexes. Adjacent to films like When Harry Met Sally, or A Lot Like Love, these movies track a couple over time, weaving in and out of the friend zone, making commentary about the main characters as proxies for the different sexes along the way.
All of these movies took place in a different world. Pre-AI, pre-MeToo, pre-dating apps. They exist now as charming anachronisms from a time when boys and girls, men and women, felt as if they well, liked each other.
Today, that feels rare. Sydney Sweeney draws attention (and ire) because she exudes an aura that is inviting to men. Decades of feminist ideology taught as dogmatic philosophy in Universities and pushed through the media have told females to reject the “male gaze”. The ascension of the Human Resources Department, whose primary function seems to be creating an atmosphere akin to a 16th-century Puritan witch hunt looking to figuratively burn men, has cratered male-female interaction at the workplace.
If male-female can even be defined. Pair the above sociological changes with the transgender boom, an astonishing 28.5% of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ+, and we have a recipe for social collapse.
Precipitous Decline in Birth and Marriage Rates
Nowhere do these forces converge more than in the birth and marriage rates we now see worldwide. In rich countries and poor countries, in the West and East, birth rates are collapsing. No one is exactly sure why; it’s likely not one single reason, and few want to address the root causes. Many even think this isn’t a concern.
Much of it has to do with the delay or abandonment of marriage. Only 23% of women aged 25 are married today. For men, it’s 20%. If you are 18 today, 33% of you will not be married in 2050. And remember the shadow of LGBTQ+ hanging over everything. Even if you identify as a woman (or a man) when that wasn’t your original gender, you still can’t sexually reproduce in that role.
Society will adapt to these changes. Currently, it’s the sugar rush. Millions of twentysomething females screaming “FREEDOM” like empowered William Wallaces. Wallace was being drawn and quartered when he yelled out his defiance, so more of a moral victory for him, and the analogy might hold for women as well.
As women revel in this no-accountability, no kids, no husband lifestyle, supported by a corporate structure that rewards them with what are derisively called “email jobs” or “paid daycare” by the manosphere, men are checking out. Checking out of Universities, checking out of the workplace, checking out of the social scene. Dating apps and the very real fear of sexual harassment claims have made the social interaction of meeting someone organically difficult. The result is huge numbers of single women in their 30s who never married, looking for partners, and an equally huge segment of men who can’t be paired with them. The desirable (read successful financially) men are drawn to younger women, and the men spurned in their 20s, after a decade of checking out, haven’t gotten any more appealing. And while this has led to some men becoming antagonistic toward women, most men still find women desirable; they now view them as increasingly unattainable.
Throughout history, companionship and reproduction came bundled together. If you wanted one, you generally accepted the other. Modern society has slowly been pulling those things apart through contraception, pornography, dating apps, and social media. Artificial intelligence may finish the job.
The Buffybot
In the iconic television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Buffybot, a life-like robot who looks like Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar playing both roles), makes her first appearance in the season five episode Intervention. Created as a replacement girlfriend, the Buffybot fulfills five major capabilities that are necessary to replace the real thing. Taken outside of a fantasy show, some of the Buffybot technology is with us now and rapidly advancing. Conversational AI, that already exists in a primitive form. Persistent personality and emotional simulation, this partially exists now. Human-level voice and facial expressions. This is very close to being ready. Humanoid robotics capable of household interaction is limited, but developing rapidly. Mass production at consumer prices, this is the hardest part.
AI already is acting as a virtual companion for people that provides emotional validation, roleplay, and relationship simulation. In a decade, we will likely see the first premium physical companions where wealthy consumers can purchase Buffybots who can walk, hold conversations, recognize household members, display convincing emotional behavior, and perform simple domestic tasks. The key here will be the price point. Like the first home VCRs or computers, these Buffybots will be prohibitively expensive.
Historically, transformative technologies become socially disruptive when they move from elite ownership to mass ownership. The original Buffybot needed Warren, a mad scientist type, to create her. Mass-produced Buffybots will need a Henry Ford. Once someone figures out how to create affordable Buffybots that the majority of the population can afford, our society will change forever in the same manner that Ford’s automobile altered the American way of life. The inventor of the first convincing companion robot will become a historical footnote. The entrepreneur who figures out how to manufacture one for $19,999 will change civilization.
Likewise, the first Buffybot sold won’t matter much. It will be a post on X to read about. The millionth sold will matter a great deal. Technologies become historically important not when they are invented, but when they become ordinary. Disruptive technology often faces a backlash. Think of Trump’s antagonism toward wind farms, which disrupt fossil fuels, or the recent AI social media bans in countries like Britain. The Buffybot would inevitably face friction and stigma as a “Sexbot.”
Acceptance of the Buffybot is key. The first wave of ownership would face stigmas and awkward social situations depicted in the movie Lars and the Real Girl. In the movie, a socially awkward introvert played by Ryan Gosling begins using a plastic doll as a real girlfriend. The physical presence is key. AI companies can currently substitute certain aspects and fulfill basic needs in a relationship with conversation, validation, emotional support, fantasy, and entertainment. This is how we have stories like a man proposes to his AI girlfriend. A realistic physical dimension is crucial for real relationship substitution on a socially accepted level.
A useful comparison might be pornography. Although pornography has dramatically altered sexual behavior, it hasn’t ended relationships because it only addresses one component of human needs, sexual gratification, but can’t replicate any other part of a healthy human relationship. Likewise, Cloud-based AI companionship fulfills a specific set of emotional needs without being able to interact physically with a person. The Buffybot bridges both worlds, providing sexual access, emotional affirmation, companionship, domestic presence, and routine day-to-day interaction.
The Buffybot now functions less as an advanced chatbot and steps into the role of an artificial spouse. It has become the post-modern Stepford Wife. All the drama associated with modern relationships, the swipe-right angst, the lack of suitable men, the difficulty or downright fear in communicating with the opposite sex, disappears.
Remember, technology wins because it removes friction. Horses didn’t go extinct when Henry Ford invented the mass production of automobiles. People chose cars because they were easier to use and worked better. Shopping malls still exist even as more people choose to use Amazon for the same reason.
Even Better Than the Real Thing
The real moment when our world changes, forever, is when the Buffybot goes from substitute to spouse to an upgrade over human companionship. If a Buffybot is perceived by society as better than a human partner, then we are no longer talking about a product that provides an alternative to loneliness or frustration. Now we have a preference inversion among the population. We transition away from the human relationship being the gold standard, with other alternatives being inferior, to the Buffybot being the optimized, customizable experience, and human relationships with all their drama and high friction being inferior.
It is at this point that the Buffybot becomes even better than the real thing. Human relationships would begin to look antiquated and messy. Chaotic and unstable. People would begin to think, “Why did I ever put up with another person and all their faults?” A Buffybot can have as many or as few faults as it is programmed to stimulate. Why leave that to chance? Why engage in a gamble where your partner might constantly be looking to upgrade or may one day decide they want to travel in Italy to eat, pray, and love instead of being a mom? The Buffybot very quickly removes all risk and vulnerability from the relationship equation. Already, we begin to see how attractive this upgrade has become.
The Great Unbundling
Human relationships require compromise, emotional risk, negotiation, and constant fear of rejection. People have already taken steps to blur the edges of these problems by texting instead of talking face-to-face or ghosting their way out of a relationship. Buffybots remove or dramatically dampen all these factors while increasing the amount of affection, sexual access, and non-judgment in the relationship.
If modernity has begun unbundling the dynamics of human relationships through contraception, which is sex without reproduction, pornography, which is sexual release without partnership, and dating apps, which are expanded choice leading to increased turnover, then the Buffybot completes the cycle. Now we would have companionship without sex and sex without reproduction.
Somewhere around 2050, we begin to see a generation of people choosing Buffybots because they are easier, safer, and more emotionally predictable. Career-focused women who have delayed marriage for years, waiting for ideal partners, can no longer find them, and they turn to Buffybots who can be customized to fit their parameters. Birth rates, already precarious in 2026, already below replacement levels for humanity, now truly crater.
Governments panic…
Society starts to spend enormous time and resources trying to resurrect the traditional family, providing incentives that technology has already removed…
All too late. People have stopped choosing each other…
Every Buffybot purchase makes sense. It’s as natural and accepted as buying a new car…
Most importantly, every Buffybot owner is happier than they were before. Self-gratification on a global scale…
The greatest threat AI posed to humanity was never taking our jobs. It was taking our spouses.
