Sex, love and robots: is this the end of intimacy?

The world is ending. The sports fields are empty, the science labs closed. No babies have been born for years. Cut to a split screen of human and robots kissing passionately.

‘They’re trapped!’ says the narrator, voice like gravel. ‘Trapped in a soft, vice-like grip of robot lips.’ Words slam against the screen, a warning. ‘Don’t. Date. Robots.’

Except Futurama’s 2001 episode ‘I Dated a Robot’, with its post-apocalyptic world of silvers and blues, wildly overestimated how long it would take before this fear became flesh.

It’s November 2015, and in Malaysia, where humidity is at 89% and it is almost certainly still raining, David Levy, a founder of the second annual Congress on Love and Sex with Robots, is free to talk on the phone – he is less busy than planned.

‘I never expected to end up here,’ he says. I hear a shrug.

The Congress on Love and Sex with Robots was meant to begin on 16 November, but was deemed illegal days after Levy arrived from London.

‘There’s nothing scientific about sex and robots,’ inspector-general of police Khalid Abu Bakar told a press conference, explaining why. ‘It is an offence to have anal sex in Malaysia [let alone sex with robots].’

‘I think they thought people would be having sex with robots or some strange thing like that,’ Levy’s co-founder Adrian David Cheok said afterwards, explaining that they had planned a series of academic talks about humanoid robotics.

But some strange thing like that, some strange thing like a human having sex with a robot, is what Levy, Cheok and others are predicting is almost our reality. They have seen the future of sex, they say, and it is teledildonic.

Hyped as the new wave in erotic tech, tele-dildonics are smart sex toys connected to the internet Teledildonic. The word rolls around the mouth like a Werther’s Original.

While there are a variety of romantic tech-sex developments appearing weekly – from the ocean of Oculus Rift possibilities to an invisible boyfriend who lives on your phone, each new development rich as a Miranda July story but as doom-laden as one of Margaret Atwood’s – it’s teledildonics that are exciting not just the porn industry, but scientists too.

Long hyped as the new wave in erotic technology, these are smart sex toys connected to the internet. And while they started life as vibrators that could be operated remotely, today the term has expanded to loosely include the new generation of robotic sex dolls.