Are we really going to make love with androids in future?

Roxxxy, Ida, Anita, Rocky – these are not the names of sizzling porn stars working up a storm in your netherland. They happen to be androids – robots with human features, even 3D-printed human skin, and some intelligence laced with conversational skills, from different manufacturers – who are out to take care of that extraordinary human need: sexual pleasure. 

Futurologist Dr Ian Pearson predicts a scenario within the next couple of decades when sex, like domestic chores, could be outsourced to humanoid robots, or sexbots. Pearson has been taking busy stirring the animated pot of robotics and ethics, with his proclamations. He says human-on-robot will be commonplace by 2050, but we’ll be halfway there by 2025. 

Imagine New Delhi, 2035: The national capital region and its sprawling suburbia are centrally and wirelessly digitised. There are driverless electric cars on the multistoried superflyovers and the metro is operated magnetically. It levitates, just a little, on a metalloid track that enables almost frictionless superspeeds.

And in your mobile phones, which are also your smart wallet, television, digital screen, and what not, there’s that particular app store that let’s you pick and choose, shop for a different kind of fun. You have takeaways for sexbots like you order pizza or dial a cab in 2015. 

This is not a dystopian (or utopian, depending on how you see it) vision of a society built on sexual slavery of the artificial kind (although, it might just be). This is the future. Science, particularly the mind-boggling field of cybernetics-cum-robotics, is progressing at a rate with which human emotional and sexual intelligence is unable to keep pace with. Technology has opened up a Pandora’s box of possibilities, and if you are a fan of the longest running BBC series Doctor Who, you’d know exactly what I am talking about.

Sex with robots? Are we that depraved/advanced? How do we choose to look at this obvious future? The portents are upon us. Already, with dating apps and breakdown of marriage as the highest/truest court of companionship, sexual relationships have become less partnerships and more short-term contracts of convenience. Think Tinder, Woo, TrulyMadly. Think Ashley Madison. Think the numerous “discreet” sites to order a “companion suited to your unique needs”. All that the future does is sends in a sexbot. It’s fifty shades of steel grey.  

Conversations in the age of Twitter, Google, cloud computing, crowd-sourcing, thin and spread out like a giant spider’s web, one-to-many rather than one-to-one, will have a counterpart in sexuality. We see the signs already. Cyber sex is really the tip of the iceberg. But with robots and artificial intelligence beginning to affect every aspect of human existence, why should sexuality remain untouched, unenhanced by its scientific power? 

Of course, it doesn’t. It isn’t. So Roxxxy, Ida, Rocky are here. Set to order for GBP 6,000. Many have that kind of money. Many have much, much more. But most of us still don’t, so perhaps, when Roxxxy, Ida and Rocky are mass-marketed, they will sell for $100, or even $20. You and I, in twenty years from now, might spend a Saturday evening sipping red wine, and let Roxxxy read out Lady Chatterley’s Lover from a Kindle-2035 edition, before doing to us what we want her to do with us. She might suggest a few "actions" of her own. Rocky might have a few tricks up his robotics arm with biceps to give Sylvester Stallone an inferiority complex. He might enjoy a trip down the memory lane, sit next to us during our Rambo watchathon, in between engaging in robo-coitus. 

If you’re wincing in mental agony by the graphic relish of Roxxxy and Rocky, you have to really ask yourself if you’re being a puritarian, perpetrating robotic racism. Will pleasure trump your religion and caste considerations? Will you demand a fair-skinned sexbot? Or will you be taking this conversation to a different level? Will you question if this is sexual slavery of a new kind? If you do, you already have champions in Kathleen Richardson of De Montfort University in UK and Erik Billing of the University of Skovde in Sweden, who consider sexbots dehumansing towards women sex workers. According to them, sex with robots is just enhanced masturbation, since the two partners are not equal. Instead of lessening sex work, say Richardson and Billing, robots will be putting real women out of jobs, creating conditions unbearable for a human female sex worker to compete with. 

Oh technology! How your leaps and bounds get tangled in the age-old questions.