What's New In The World Of Robot Sex?

Robots posing as people online are "a menace," Tim Wu wrote recently in The New York Times. Bots swarm the Internet pretending to be human, slinging election propaganda and controlling hot Broadway tickets. Robots, some in embodied human form, may take over a startling percentage of U.S. jobs in the next couple of decades. In his book out last month, Will Robots Take Your Job? Nigel M. de S. Cameron notes that the U.S.'s 3.5 million workers in the trucking industry are at risk because of the coming rise of autonomous vehicles, but robots are moving also to "occupy the space of emotional intelligence." Robot health-care companions and virtual psychiatrists may be in the offing. Robots do, of course, offer huge benefits to us.