Next year may be the year of the robot lover.
While many increasingly fear automation in the workplace, some futurists predict the machines will come for our love lives in 2025.
This new year marks the date futurist Dr Ian Pearson anticipated humanity ‘will start to see some forms of robot sex appearing in high-income, very wealthy households.’
And the physics and math PhD, who has boasted of having an 85 percent accuracy rate for his forecasts, argues women might overtake men in the adoption of sex robots by 2025 — in part, because they already have a technological head start.
‘Vibrators have been around for over a century,’ Dr Pearson noted, ‘but now the vibrant sex toy industry doesn’t just make standalone devices, but teledildonic devices that bring all the fun and functionality of computing and networks to sex too.’
First conceived in 1975, ‘teledildonics’ has become the technical term of art for mechanical sex toys that operate remotely, whether via the internet or otherwise.
By some surveys, as many as 63 percent of women admit they either already use or would like to use a sex toy, with 40 percent admitting virtual reality would make sex more fun and enjoyable.
Although the market for human-like sexbots, which can cost more than $15,000, is often imagined to be male dominated, other analysts have also suggested this gender balance is destined to flip.
‘I think it’s the men who should be worried,’ Harvard-trained mathematician and data scientist Dr Cathy O’Neil said. ‘It’s entirely possible that robots can outperform them.’
‘In the #MeToo age, I feel like raising standards is quite reasonable,’ Dr O’Neil wrote in 2018 Bloomberg op-ed. ‘It’s called for, in fact.’
According to at least one industry survey, women and men are already nearing parity in their use of sex dolls, suggesting this gender flip might truly be on the horizon.
While only 17.4 percent of people reported having had sex with a robot at all, based on current data collected by Bedbible for 2024, the split between the sexes came to 17.8 percent of men and 16.5 percent of women.
But according to Dr Pearson, economics will still likely hinder widespread adoption in the near term.
‘While some people will enthusiastically embrace relationship-free robot sex as soon as they can afford one, as early as 2025, it won’t have much chance of overtaking sex with humans overall until 2050,’ the futurist wrote in his landmark study for Bondara.
The shift will begin with virtual sex, which ‘most people’ will have had by 2030, in part due to the rise in connected devices, but also the nature of work and long-distance relationships, he argued in the 2015 report commissioned by the UK adult toy retailer
‘Some might only use straightforward VR without the sex toys as part of that,’ he predicted. ‘By 2035 toys will be better developed and most people will be well used to VR sex by then, so will have acquired a collection of sex toys that interwork with VR.’
‘A lot of people will still have reservations about sex with robots,’ but by midcentury, 25 years from 2025, Dr Pearson predicts humanity’s ‘squeamishness will gradually evaporate.’
Key technological advancements will help build consumer comfort with robotic sexual companions across those decades, according to Dr Pearson, ‘as the AI [artificial intelligence] and mechanical behavior and their feel improves, and they start to become friends with strong emotional bonds.’
‘You can theoretically buy robots now. They’re not very good,’ Pearson told Inverse in 2015. ‘They really fall far short of a proper sex robot.’
‘It’s a small market today, and will be a small market in 2025,’ he predicted.
And, in fact, Bedbible reports in a world of billions of people, only about 156 sex robots were sold every day in 2024.
The $201million sex robot industry, they found, only accounts for 0.5 percent of the $37billion global sex toy industry each year.
Dr Pearson, however, has acknowledged that he is not infallible: In 2020, just before he ‘happily retired,’ Dr Pearson admitted to CNN his predictions for hyper-advanced, fully conscious and emotive AI was off by decades, if not more.
‘It hasn’t progressed as fast as I thought,’ Pearson told CNN. ‘AI was developing very quickly at the start of the century, so we had predictions that by 2015 we’d have conscious machines that were smarter than people.’
‘I would estimate AI has probably progressed about 35 or 40 percent slower than we expected it to,’ he confessed.
