10 Ways Robots Will Change All Our Lives Forever

We couldn't have a list of the future of robotics without broaching the subject of robot sexytime now could we?

With the development of technology, there is almost always someone somewhere who is thinking about how they can use it to get their rocks off, and robots are certainly no different.

There are some fairly serious discussions going on at the moment about what the true effect of a digitised sex industry would look like. Obviously, we already have sex robots on a much smaller scale, there's probably one in your girlfriend's bedside drawer right now, but the impact of a full blown sex industry would be very different from a rampant rabbit collection.

There are a few theories out there for which way things could go if robots were to replace prostitutes. The simplest of these would be the displacement hypothesis, in which robots just replace human sex workers. This transition would potentially be accelerated in countries in which prostitution is illegal, but the manufacture of sex robots isn't. Ethical issues of prostitution such as trafficking, objectification, human rights and the spread of STDs also wouldn't be an issue. If this were to happen, the already vulnerable sex workers would face mass unemployment.

In another scenario, human prostitutes would be resilient to the robotic invasion, with many people preferring the human-to-human contact over a quick bot-bonk. In this case, it is even possible that the human sex worker would become more of a premium "product" in comparison to their robotic counterparts.

This is before we get into the whole world of virtual reality and a boom in robotic sex aids. The real question here is where do we draw the line between sex toy and hooker-droid?