In his monthly column, Brian Gray from Glasgow-based consultancy Lascivious Marketing offers his thoughts on all things marketing…and perhaps one or two other things. This month he plays Devil's Advocate to the sex robot detractors. Oscar Wilde famously opined that he could resist everything but temptation. Opinion pieces with questionable arguments have the same effect on me. The British newspaper The Guardian published an article on Monday 25th September written by "robotics expert" Jenny Kleeman, titled "Should we ban sex robots while we have the chance?" The sub-heading posits: "AI sex dolls are on their way, with potentially sinister social consequences.

Human-robot relationships are a running theme in pop culture, from the cylons of Battlestar Galactica to Spike Jonze's film Her and last year's hit show Westworld. But that kind of scenario might not be science fiction much longer. Romance between humans and machines is already nearing the realm of the possible. This year, the California company Abyss Creations plans to start selling a new generation of high-tech sex robots -- dolls that can actually speak and respond to touch. And according to artificial intelligence expert Dr. David Levy, in a few generations, we won't just be having sex with robots, we'll be marrying them.

In the face of AI exerts repeatedly predicting the rise of sex robots, it's increasingly difficult to insist that such machines strictly belong to a far-off, dystopian future. But some robotics experts predict we'll soon be doing far more than having sexual intercourse with machines. Instead, we'll be making love to them--with all the accompanying romantic feelings. At this week's "Love and Sex with Robots" conference at Goldsmith University in London, David Levy, author of a book on human-robot love, predicted that human-robot marriages would be legal by 2050. Adrian Cheok, computing professor at City University London and director of the Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore, says the prediction is not so farfetched.