Sex, love and robots: is this the end of intimacy?

The sports fields are empty, the science labs closed. No babies have been born for years. Cut to a split screen of human and robots kissing passionately. "They're trapped!" says the narrator, voice like gravel. Words slam against the screen, a warning. Except Futurama's 2001 episode "I Dated a Robot", with its post-apocalyptic world of silvers and blues, wildly overestimated how long it would take before this fear became flesh. It's November 2015, and in Malaysia, where humidity is at 89% and it is almost certainly still raining, David Levy, a founder of the second annual Congress on Love and Sex with Robots, is free to talk on the phone – he is less busy than planned.