Sex enters robotics age

"Good morning, I'd like the 3-KPO-3XC, please!" "Is that the full 144-hour 3CX model sir or just the normal dateline 2-hour plug-in?"

This conversation may not belong to the too distant future. Research work by Terrence Aym* "Scientists predict sex robot partners in coming decades" points towards a not-so-distant world in which mankind cohabits with sexbots.

The idea is not that recent either. Ovid's Metamorphoses bring us the story of Pygmalion, a sculptor who fell in love with his creation. Indeed the idea permeates literature through the ages, culminating in Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's work, L'Eve Futur, in which a scientist creates a female machine with whom (which?) a British Lord falls in love.

We are reminded that the term robot was coined by the Czech Karel Capek in his 1920 play R.U.R. ("Rossum's Universal Robots"), using the Czech word for "work", "robota". Terrence Aym introduces us to a University of Maastricht researcher into Artificial Intelligence, David Levy, who tells us "My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots."

Other researchers speak of the Longevity Orgasm as sexbots perfect "sexplosive" devices and sex skills, honed on thousands of years and web-pages of inputs and coupled with near-carnal features. As robotics becomes more advanced, so do robots take on more and more human features, continues the article. For that reason, it would not be far-fetched to envisage a world where humans are head over heels in love with their sexbots.

Real Dolls, for instance, is a company that has been working on female sex androids for over a decade. Levy predicts that Artificial Partners will mimic all aspects of human behaviour and that "the robots humans design and build will become virtually indistinguishable from people. They will mimic humans in every way and some humans will literally fall in love with them, lust for them, and enter into sexual relationships with them".

And not far down the line will be the sexbot arriving twenty minutes late for her wedding with her human partner waiting nervously at the end of the aisle. Let us just hope she does not step on an electric cable, go "POING" and disintegrate before the distraught husband-to-be and his guests, because on her side of the church...
*Scientists predict sex robot partners in coming decades