In the mood for a little skin-to-skin?" coos a lover slipping between the sheets.
"Not tonight," mumbles the partner, turning around. "Just make it with the robot, if you want."
A kinky sci-fi fantasy? Love and lust in the 23rd century?
Not at all, says David Levy, a PhD in gender studies and artificial intelligence and author of "Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relations".
By mid-century, predicts the 62-year-old expert, getting it on with an electronic femme-fatale or a superstud sexbot will become an accepted part of the human landscape.
"Think of it: great sex on tap, 24/7," he said. People may even fall in love with their hard-wired sex slaves, he adds.
Not everyone embraces Levy's vision of a future where humanoids guarantee satisfaction in bed along with pre-programmed post-coital conversation.
But many agree it is on the cards, given exponential leaps in computer power, progress in mimicking human muscles and movements, and headway in artificial intelligence (AI) software to replicate emotions and personality.
"Already today, the best quality synthetic voices cannot be distinguished from human voices," Levy told AFP, adding that some artificial skins now rival the smoothest of baby bottoms.
Last November, researchers at Waseda University in Japan unveiled a robot, named Twendy-One, that can cook, talk, obey verbal commands, and use its soft silicon-wrapped hands -- each equipped with 241 pressure sensors -- to interact with humans.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080212144453.spddtsz8&show_article=1
