Rise of the Sexbots

Well, not literally, not yet anyway -- but that'll be happening soon enough with further advances in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence to the point that you will no longer be able to distinguish whether or not your sexbot was having an actual simulated orgasm or just faking it. For those of you who haven't made it past first base in the world of sexual machines and are asking, "Sexbot? A "sexbot" is a robot designed for humans to have sexual intercourse with. It is a machine engineered for sexual simulation and stimulation. If this sounds a bit mechanical and crass, it's because, well, it sort of is. That being said, a major facet of human sexual intercourse is mechanical -- so much so that prescribing tool analogies to our descriptions of it have become part of our popular cultural lexicon. But please, don't drill me on the particulars. While there are deep emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions to human sexuality, it is, at its core, a very physical action. Most of us were forged in the crucible of that act, excepting the small percentage (about 2 percent in the U.S.) of embryos conceived using in vitro fertilization. My purpose here is not to pass judgement on people's sex lives nor their preferences or fetishes nor wade into the morass of a sexual morality debate. As a technologist, it's my obligation to inform you that sexbots are a rapidly emerging technology that will have a profound impact upon the future of human sexual relations with the integration of increasingly life-like robots into the fabric of everyday human life. While sexbots are a fairly new phenomenon, the existence of man-made sexual devices has been around for tens of thousands of years, beginning with the artificial phallus, the oldest of which was discovered in Germany in 2005. Made of siltstone and measuring in at 7.8" in length, it is estimated to be 28,000 years old.