Expert predicts that women will have more sex with robots than men next year
Next year could be the year of the robot enthusiast.
While many are increasingly fearful of automation in the workplace, some futurists predict that machines will enter our love lives by 2025.
This new year marks the date when futurist Dr. Ian Pearson expected that humanity will “see some forms of robot sex emerge in very wealthy, high-income households.”
And the PhD candidate in physics and mathematics, who boasts that his predictions have an accuracy of 85 percent, argues that women could overtake men in sex robot adoption by 2025 – partly because they already have a technological advantage.
“Vibrators have been around for more than a century,” Dr. Pearson noted, “but now the vibrant sex toy industry is making not just standalone devices, but teledildonic devices that bring all the fun and functionality of computers and networking to sex too.” .’
First coined in 1975, ‘teledildonics’ has become the technical term for mechanical sex toys that work remotely, via the internet or otherwise.
According to some surveys, as many as 63 percent of women admit that they already use or would like to use a sex toy, while 40 percent admit that virtual reality would make sex more fun and enjoyable.
While the market for humanoid sexbots, which can cost more than $15,000, is often thought to be male-dominated, other analysts have also suggested that this gender balance is destined to reverse.
“I think it’s men who should be concerned,” says Harvard-educated mathematician and data scientist Dr. Cathy O’Neil. ‘It is quite possible that robots can perform better.’
Women could overtake men in sex robot adoption by 2025 – partly because they already have a head start: ‘Vibrators have been around for more than a century,’ one expert noted
Delaware-based company Realbotix introduced a sex bot for women in 2018 called ‘Henry’ (above). The $11,000 companion, controlled via an app, promised jokes, “sexy sounds” and “superhuman sexual performance” – with optional extras that would bring the cost to $15,600
“In the #MeToo era, I feel like raising standards is entirely reasonable,” Dr. O’Neil wrote Bloomberg opinion from 2018. “It’s even necessary.”
According to at least one industry survey, women and men are already approaching parity in their use of sex dolls, indicating that this gender shift is well and truly underway.
While only 17.4 percent of people reported having had sex with a robot at all current data collected by Bedbible before 2024, the gender split was 17.8 percent of men and 16.5 percent of women.
But Dr. Pearson says economics are still likely to 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 in general until 2050,” the futurist wrote in his pioneering study for Bondara.
The shift will start with virtual sex, which “most people” will have had by 2030, partly due to the rise of connected devices, but also due to the nature of work and long-distance relationships, he argued in the 2015 report commissioned by the British toy store for adults
‘SUncle would only be able to use basic VR without the sex toys as part of it,” he predicted. ‘By 2035, toys will be better developed and by then most people will be well accustomed to VR sex, so they will have acquired a collection of sex toys that work with VR.’
“Many people will still have reservations about sex with robots,” but by mid-century, 25 years from 2025, Dr. Pearson predicts the future of humanity. ‘prudishness will gradually disappear.’
Science fiction and popular culture tend to assume that the sex robot market will be dominated by male desires – as depicted in the 2014 film ‘Ex Machina’ (still image above)
Major technological developments over the past few decades, according to Dr. Pearson, will help increase consumers’ comfort with robotic sexual companions, “as AI (artificial intelligence) and mechanical behavior and sensation improve, and they begin to befriend strong emotional bonds.’
‘In theory you can now buy robots. They’re not very good,” Pearson said Vice versa in 2015. ‘They really fall far short of a real sex robot.’
“It’s a small market today, and it 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 per day in 2024.
The The $201 million sex robot industry, they found, represents just 0.5 percent of the $37 billion global sex toy industry annually.
Dr. However, Pearson has acknowledged that he is not infallible: in 2020, just before he ‘happily retired‘, said Dr. Pearson admitted to CNN that his predictions for hyper-advanced, fully conscious and emotional AI were decades, if not more, off track.
“It didn’t happen as quickly as I thought,” Pearson said CNN. “AI developed very quickly at the beginning of this century, so we had predictions that by 2015 we would have conscious machines that were smarter than humans.”
“I estimate that AI has probably evolved about 35 to 40 percent slower than we expected,” he admitted.