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"In the mood for a little skin-to-skin?" coos a lover slipping between the sheets. "Not tonight," mumbles the partner, turning around. "Just make it with the robot, if you want."
A kinky sci-fi fantasy? Love and lust in the 23rd century? Not at all, says David Levy, a professor of gender studies and artificial intelligence, and author of Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relations.
By mid-century, predicts the 62-year-old academic, getting it on with an electronic femme-fatale or a superstud sexbot will become an accepted part of the human landscape. "Think of it: great sex on tap, 24/7," he says. He even suggests that people may fall in love with their hard-wired sex slaves.
Not everyone embraces Levy's vision of a future where humanoids guarantee satisfaction in bed along with pre-programmed post-coital conversation. But many agree it is on the cards, given exponential leaps in computer power, progress in mimicking human muscles and movements, and headway in artificial intelligence (AI) software to replicate emotions and personality.
Synthetic voices and silicon-wrapped hands
"Already today, the best quality synthetic voices cannot be distinguished from human voices," says Levy, adding that some artificial skins now rival the smoothest of baby bottoms.
In November 2007, researchers at Waseda University in Japan unveiled a robot, named Twendy-One, that can cook, talk, obey verbal commands, and use its soft silicon-wrapped hands – each equipped with 241 pressure sensors – to interact with humans.
Even so, it will be a long time, Levy acknowledges, before we cannot tell the difference between human and humanoid.
The sexbot of the likes of Gigolo Joe, played by Jude Law in Steven Spielberg's 2001 film Artificial Intelligence: A.I, which provide chat and emotional support as well as sex, are at least 40 decades away, he thinks.
Not all AI experts agree, though. "I don't think we will have convincing 'human-like' robots within that time frame," comments Frederic Kaplan, a robotics researcher at the Federal Polytechnic School in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Kaplan, who pushed the envelope of robot intelligence in programming the brain of Sony's eerily adorable robot dog Aibo, also wonders whether we even want robots made in our own image. "Human-machine interactions will be interesting in their own right, not as a 'simulation' of human relations," he says.
