CYBERSPACE — With all this talk about Love Dolls and Dutch Wives and Real — cyber — Touch and Spike Jonze’s “Her,” it’s reasonable to wonder whether or not the near future will offer sweet robot lovin’ for the general copulating public.
While Pew Research Center’s report, “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs” primarily considers the role of robots in the workforce, it concludes that its 1,900 experts sourced “envision automation and intelligent digital agents permeating vast areas of our work and personal lives by 2025.”
Essentially personal, sex does not the escape the virtual permeation. Lead researcher for Gigaom Research Stowe Boyd boldly asserts in the report, “Robotic sex partners will be commonplace, although the source of scorn and division, the way that critics today bemoan selfies as an indicator of all that's wrong with the world.”
Meanwhile, the experts remain dubious about whether automatons will infiltrate and topple the workforce as we know it. The report concludes that “they are divided on whether these advances will displace more jobs than they create.”
Salon.com reporter EJ Dickson notes that while sex and tech do seem be evolving together, evinced by the rising popularity and prominence of teledildonics in the adult novelty sphere, the associated stigma may be on the outs.
“…general cultural attitudes toward sex and robotics seem to be shifting toward the positive end of the spectrum: Back in May, a U.K. survey reported that one in five respondents would go to get-down town with a sexbot,” Dickson writes. “But despite the fact that society in general is apparently moving toward a more A.I.-sex-positive direction, most of the currently available technology seems restricted to toys and sex dolls, a far cry from the sentient, uber-sophisticated ‘robotic sex partners’ of Boyd’s prophecy.”
Until the dawn of uber-sophisticated sex robots, you can always close your eyes, turn up the Kraftwerk, and stick your dick into this.