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Humans could soon be having sexual relationships with robots, a top academic has claimed.
Dr Helen Driscoll said advances in technology mean the way in which humans interact with robots is set to change drastically in the coming years.
Dr Driscoll, a leading authority on the psychology of sex and relationships, said 'sex tech' was already advancing at a fast pace and by 2070, physical relationships will seem primitive.
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She said: "Most people successfully integrate other forms of virtual reality into their lives, but virtual sex - not to mention love - will be seen by some as infidelity, and this will present real challenges to some relationships."In the world of the future, we could well see human relationships increasingly conducted entirely online.
Would you feel cheated on if your partner had sex with a robot?
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday August 05 2015, @12:08PM
At this time overpopulation seems a much more imminent and serious problem than underpopulation.
Also don't forget the PHD reproduction problem, where individual profs will sometimes get all handwringy about not having enough doctoral students working under them, without thinking thru the whole problem that in a steady state-ish field the average college prof only needs to produce ONE successful phd student in their lifetime. If they squirt out 100 the whole system collapses based on supply and demand.
Likewise around 1900 european ancestry folks all have genealogy stories about families with 12 kids and 11 survived to adulthood in complete shock because in the olden days pre-civil engineering women had to squirt out like 12 kids to have 50:50 odds that two would survive to adulthood for the next generation. Now that the odds are more like 2.1 kids per woman, its not as much of an issue.
So technically women only need to have sex 2.1 times in their life, if they time for max fertility, partner is fertile, etc. Some fraction of the population spending multiple decades of their lives not having sex is just not a serious reproductive problem.
Another way to put it is aside from very short term honeymoon type experiences most folks never spend more than an hour a day having sex yet the world is crawling with kids, so spending 19/20ths of the time or 95% of the time with robots is CLEARLY not a serious impairment.