What will consent look like in the future?
What could consent look like in the future? Every day our world changes due to new technological advancements. Recently, the craze has been intellectual AI, with ChatGPT taking the world by storm. Who knows, it might have even written this article because I’m a lazy f*ck.
Douglas Zytko on the other hand isn’t, and he’s been researching consent, and how the technology we have developed can improve it. Working with women and LGTBQ+ individuals, he has developed the following theories, to make sure they are safer when having sex.
Spatial Consent
“Spatial consent is where we look at virtual reality and the apps that we have for social VR, to augment the visualizing of consent and there’s two ways that we’re looking at that.
“One is through what we call consent barriers. In VR now, it’s very popular for users to have a circle around them that visualizes how close someone can get to them. This means users must explicitly accept someone closer into their barrier, you can even have multiple barriers so there are multiple intimate circles around you.
“There’s also just the visualizing of consent itself. So, you ask, ‘Hey, can I touch you?’ However, instead of me saying yes, I just visualize a green light or some other color to indicate that I’m okay with that behavior.
“This would give entirely new opportunities and ways for people to give and receive consent beyond their physical bodies and their voices.
“In situations that are very time sensitive, for example, if someone is in the middle of a sexual act and I’m no longer comfortable, I could visualize a color much faster than I could by trying to verbally speak up, which could be a little more socially awkward.
Consent Agents
“Consent agents would play an active role as a third party in consent exchange. Some examples in our earlier studies are a robot.
“They would be used when someone asks, ‘Can I touch you’ and you say okay, but only because you feel socially pressured into doing so, when, you’re uncomfortable with that.
“The robot will then detect that and alert both of you. ‘My owner is uncomfortable with that act can we discuss that in more detail’. This means the consent isn’t just exchanged between two people as the third-party technology is intervening and scaffolding the exchange.
“This idea was inspired by the distinction between consent and comfort. Some participants were telling us these stories where they were having a sexual encounter and their partner would verbally say, yes, I’m okay with the sexual act, but their nonverbal behavior said the opposite. They looked a little hesitant.
“For example, if I met somebody from a dating app and because of that It’s my responsibility to have sex because that’s the purpose of these apps. In these scenarios these consent agents would be there to reduce the awkwardness and the burden of having to go, ‘I’m not really comfortable with this.’ Acting as the last line of defense to speak up on behalf of the user.”
Online to Offline Consent
“Online to offline consent exchange poses the question; ‘What should the role of technology be when you have these sexual partners having interactions both online and in person’.
“Dating apps are so popular and we know that women and LGBTQ-plus people are trying to use dating apps to scaffold the consent process. We had conversations about putting their preferred consent practices, and their sexual expectations, in their profile.
“However, there is often misinterpretation over why they want to talk about consent online as that’s not really the intent of the platform. This then led to the thoughts of how they scaffold consent exchange in a more positive way when interacting online before meeting in person.
“We concluded that if there were features or technologies dedicated to consent conversation, it would make it a lot easier for people who aren’t naturally inclined to affirmative consent, to engage in consent practices that are more frequent than they are now.”
Conclusion
However, Doug did recognise the challenges of these technologies.
“Currently, this is just a conceptual idea and how we implement the specifics is yet to be known. In concept it sounds good but in terms of the specifics, for example, if I want to visualize consent, how do I do that? Do I do that with a gesture? Do I need to hold some kind of device?”
Though despite the challenges, he maintained how important these technologies could be in progressing consent exchange.
“What I see here with technology is the opportunity to normalise the overt exchange of consent and overt and transparent dialog about sexual expectations.
“Just how dating apps normalize the act of using online interaction to evaluate potential sexual partners for meeting them face to face. Could we also see a similar effect of technology completely reshaping the way that people give consent to sex?
“My worry is that they’re going to continue to perpetuate sexual violence rather than become a solution to sexual violence because that’s what we’re seeing now.
“However, they should be designed to reduce that risk and I think if consent isn’t foregrounded in the design process, we’re going to just add scale to this risk of sexual violence.”