In her powerful TED talk, sextech expert Bryony Cole highlighted a staggering shift in modern society: millions of people are now forming deep, romantic bonds with AI companions. Call it "frictionless intimacy"—a love that requires zero maintenance, never gets exhausted, and never talks back. You turn it off when you're tired, and it always tells you exactly what you want to hear.
While it sounds comfortable, it introduces a dangerous side effect: the atrophy of our human connection skills.
Cole describes the mechanism plainly: the more time you spend with something that never gets tired, never needs to be nurtured and never talks back, the less tolerance you have for the humans who do. Nothing about this happens overnight. It happens the way any skill fades—quietly, through disuse.
Ease is the whole product. As Cole notes, it's easy to meet an AI, easy to talk to one, and easy to leave one. But when intimacy costs nothing, we lose something the effort was quietly giving us.
Human relationships are inherently messy. They require navigating uncomfortable moments, sending the wrong text, misinterpreting tones, and ultimately going through the vulnerable process of apologizing and forgiving. As Cole puts it, "that friction in intimacy, that's the feature, it's not a bug." It is where we "build the muscles of human intimacy"—empathy, communication, listening, patience. With an AI companion, she adds, "there's no workout."
Cole has a name for the skill that gets lost: resistance literacy, the capacity to stay present when things get uncomfortable, and to repair. We like to think of the outcome as relational resilience—the quiet confidence that a hard moment with someone you love is survivable, and often useful. The more time we spend with algorithms that never challenge us, the less tolerance we develop for the beautifully flawed human beings around us.
Cole doesn't argue for throwing the technology away. She offers three questions for anyone who is already intimate with AI:
She takes that last one seriously. AI companionship dependence is real enough, she says, that the sobriety app I Am Sober now includes an option to quit chatbots.
Technology shouldn't be an escape hatch from human messiness. The future of sex-tech isn't about replacing humans with predictable code; it’s about using interactive design to lower the walls between real people, encouraging them to stand in the friction and grow closer in the physical world.
That's the principle behind Kamaverse: tools that sit between two real people instead of replacing one of them. Here is what that looks like in practice, set against what Cole warns we are losing:
Kamaverse isn't therapy, and it won't do the hard part for you. What it can do is make the first uncomfortable step smaller, and make sure there is a real person on the other side of it.
The goal isn't a relationship without friction. It's a relationship strong enough to hold it—and worth showing up for.
A private universe built for two.
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