ABSTRACT
The concluding chapter sums up the insights gleaned through this 800-year journey through fiction. The First Sexual Revolution set everything in motion, but the pivotal change was the Second Sexual Revolution granting the highest authority in matters of mating to individuals. Young Homo sapiens have generally not been free to choose their own mates. Parental meddling, to various extents, was a human universal. Today’s dysfunction stems from Western societies not having found norms and values that can reconcile individual choice with communal needs. After more than half a century’s hegemony, confluent love seems to have played itself out, which means that it is time to unite around new beliefs. The chapter ends by sharing how a handful of Nordic sci-fi narratives envision the future of mating. These tales attest to why our era’s Fourth Industrial Revolution is likely to bring about a Fourth Sexual Revolution, one of artificially intelligent sex robots, AI-driven matching services, and gene-edited reproduction, just to mention a few predicted innovations. Tomorrow’s mating morality might be conceptualized as dataist love, which transfers authority in matters of mating from human individuals to a machine that is meant to understand our emotions better than we do.
