by Terrence Aym

Created on: October 31, 2010

Robots and sex have been discussed and debated for more than a century.

The first film to showcase a "robot" was also a sexy love story! Back in 1896, the French movie "L'Eve Futur" ("The Future Eve") featured a storyline revolving around a brilliant scientist. After he constructs a female machine a British lord falls in love with her. What follows is a Pygmalion story with a robot as the protagonist.

But no one called mechanical men "robots" back then. The term wasn't coined until Czech playwright Karel Capek created the word "robot" in his 1920 play, R.U.R. (an acronym for "Rossum's Universal Robots"). The word itself is derived from the Czech word "robota" meaning "work."

Robots have been used for entertainment, rescues, construction, manufacturing, teaching…just about anything the human mind can conceive of. And of course one of the things often at the forefront of human minds is sex. So why not with robots?

David Levy, an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands shred his personal vision of robotics back in 2007. "My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots."

And he's not alone. Many of those on the cutting edge of robotics and AI share Levy's vision of "fully functional" robots within 40 years or less.

Invasion of the sexbots

Robotic researcher Hank Hyena tore up the 2050 time line and boldly predicts sexual robots by the end of 2011. He made his prediction in the article, "Sexbots Will Give Us Longevity Orgasm" in the magazine H+ (December 2009 issue). Here's a brief excerpt:

"Remember the most convulsive, brain-ripping climax you ever had…? Sexbots will electrocute our flesh with climaxes twice as gigantic because they’ll be more desirable, patient, eager, and altruistic than their meat-bag competition, plus they’ll be uploaded with supreme sex-skills from millennia of erotic manuals, archives and academic experiments, and their anatomy will feature sexplosive devices…"

The article becomes a bit more explicit after that.

Levy completed his PhD 3 years ago focusing on the subject of current and future human-robot relationships. His ground-breaking thesis addressed many of the philosophical, ethical and legal issues concerning relationships, sexual unions and marriages with intelligent machines.

The ancient Greeks and Romans had fables of artists falling in love with machine-like muses and men beguiled

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