Is there A sex bot

Answer 1

Short answer: not yet.

Medium answer: hopefully sooner than later! Many many people (perhaps millions) are waiting!

Long answer:

It depends on what you mean by sex bot. Sexbots can be hardware, software, or a combination of both.

If you mean sexbot as a real loving lovable sexy intelligent robot you could have sex with, no, we aren't there quite yet. There are groups working on them though. There are also versions along the way - products of different companies and research groups that are milestones along the way toward making the real thing:

- There are machines that provide nice sexual stimulation - but they're just machines.

- There are life-size lifelike dolls that some find sexy and some people actually bond with. RealDolls, for example, come with all the right sexual equipment, and the BBC did a tv special about some of the men who own and love them. There was also the movie, "Lars and the Real Girl". The problem with such dolls is that they're inanimate, they just lie there. They have no AI (Artificial Intelligence), so no emotions or flirting. And they have no self-moving parts, so they just don't move.

- There are Japanese efforts to take the sex doll concept to the next level: robots with facial expressions, personality, limited movements. Some of them incorporate limited speech recognition and can speak some limited vocabulary.

- As for the full-blown sex robot, David Levy recently wrote a book predicting we should have fully-functioning robots we'll have sex with, and fall in love with, in 40 years. (Personally I think it will be much sooner). David Levy is an expert in AI.

If you mean sexbot as a software program you can interact with, for example on the internet, then currently there are several different versions of those. There are sexbots (autonomous programs) in chat rooms that basically chat up a nice sexy line in order to draw mostly gullible guys to porn and sexcam sites. There are people who have made up little toy programs based on an old AI program called Eliza which can talk a bit of naughty, kind of like phone sex with your computer. There is also at least one effort underway to make a sexbot program that will help "interface" two humans over the internet - for example in chat rooms or even VR simulations like Second Life or WoW. This could eventually lead to real (and really great) teledildonics, where two humans separated by great distances (or even time) could have sex via remote control. (Think of soldiers in foreign lands separated from their spouses for months at a time).

As for combinations of hardware and software, those are possible too - like the sexbot in the movie "The 6th Day" which was a combination of chair, head connection, VR (Virtual Reality), and 3D projection of a virtual girlfriend. There are researchers working on this technology. Nothing yet (this is 2009) to knock your socks off, but they're working on it.

Sexbot technology is awaited by many on this planet as the answer to both personal and global needs. In some countries there has been so much infanticide and abortion of baby girls on such a huge scale (because boys are more highly valued by their societies), that there are serious imbalances - places where there are one or two million more horny males than there are available females. Rather than be lonely and sexless, why wouldn't they want a female robotic companion?

And sexbots and robot technology are not just for men. Many women are very interested in a sex partner that will listen to them, cuddle, and not be abusive. For them, great sex would just be a super added bonus.

One other important note about real sex robots: sexbot technology will raise some very very serious ethical issues, even if robots don't achieve true consciousness. As a simple example, suppose your friend or next door neighbor has such a crush on you that they get a sexbot that looks just like you so they can have sex with "you" anytime they want. Or suppose someone you know is gay and you're not - but they can get a sexbot of you which they can use for whatever sex act they fancy. I don't know about you, but that creeps me out.

Sexbot technology will continue to develop. Stay tuned for further developments.