Robot Sex
• Erotic Technology
I guess we can look forward to a cybernetic version of Guess Who Came to Dinner?
Just as long as they look better than those awful Real Dolls. (Maybe they’ll be designed by the folks who work for Apple.)
Other dilemmas may arrive sooner than we think, says Christensen: “People are going to be having sex with robots within five years.” So should limits be set on the appearance, for example, of such robotic sex toys?
The greatest danger, however, is likely to lie with robots that areable to learn from their “experiences”. As systems develop, robots are likely to have much more sophisticated self-learning mechanisms built into them and it may become impossible to predict exactly how they will behave.
“My guess is that we’ll have conscious machines before 2020,” says Ian Pearson, futurologist-in-residence at telecommunications and information technology group BT. “If we put that in a robot, it’s an android. That is an enormous ethical change.”