Society has barely gotten over the homosexual thing, now we’re struggling with robosexual? In a report commissioned by Bondara, a leading UK sex toy retailer, Dr Ian Pearson lays down a timeline for when we can expect sex with robots. Here’s the highlights:
- By 2030, VR sex experiences will be as common as watching porn today. The foundations are already there, with new porn studios jumping on the VR bandwagon every day, particularly as we get closer to the consumer release of Valve/HTC Vive and Oculus Rift consumer VR headsets.
- By 2035, most people will have a VR sex toy, something that reacts to the on-screen action in some way. These also already exist, though are so far underwhelming, with male toys like Kiiroo Onyx and Lovense Max using the same tired old vibration stimulation. What we really need is a more affordable Venus 2000 with API.
- Some forms of robotic sex will be found in high-income households as early as 2025. If anything, I think that’s underestimating the speed of progression. Given the emergence of affordable robots like Pepper with the ability to dance (see below), it isn’t unrealistic to strap a dildo onto one and teach it the dance of love.
- Robot sex will overtake human-human sex by 2050. A bold statement, but not one I disagree with. There’s a probably a large proportion of society that already enjoys more time with their plain old sex toys than they do human sex. While most partners aren’t threatened by the use of a sex toy (some even encourage it) – will the same be true of a robo-sextoy? Will it depend upon how human the robot looks? Will many couple embrace the idea of a threesome, where the third is a robot?
Bear in mind, the guy who wrote this is a full time futurologist. Yeh, that’s a thing. I should also note that people who make it their job to predict stuff are rarely any better than the rest of us at it. But I mostly agree with him anyway, so he must be correct.
http://graphics.bondara.com/Future_sex_report.pdf
So what’s the doomsday scenario here exactly? A large proportion of the human population stops pumping out little copies of itself and the population declines until we hit a sustainable equilibrium? Well, wouldn’t that be just terrible.
As with most crazy robot sex stories, there’s a Japanese element to all this. Softbank, a leading mobile and broadband provider, has created a humanoid (and I use that term very loosely indeed) robot with which users can interact; it attempts to read emotions and provide counselling of sorts, as well silly functions like dancing. This isn’t a prototype might come next year thing: it’s available for just shy of 200,000 yen ($1600), and 4,000 units have already been sold. It doesn’t clean, it doesn’t do the washing up, and it doesn’t even make tea. It doesn’t even have legs, rolling around some small tank tracks instead. But it did warrant a user agreement from Softbank asking users to not attempt to have sex with it.
The policy owner must not perform any sexual act or other indecent behaviour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCFYw8mIqcc
Even I can’t work out how you’d actually have sex with this thing, but I’m sure some enterprising modders could fit something down there. Just a strap-on would probably do it; look at this little thing go!
The user agreement clause has yet to be tested.
Personally, I say bring it on. We already have a multitude of sex machines which can be moved around and positioned for optimal penetration, some of which can even be programmed with complex motion patterns. I’m not sure why it’s such a stretch to give them arms and a head. Suddenly we’re all that’s bad, mmmkay?
Get out of my yard, I’ll fuck any non-sentient mechanical being all I damn well like. Come here, C3PO.
