9 "Guaranteed" Visions Of The Future That Will Make Us All Look Stupid

7. Sex Robots

Right, no one is saying that no one is ever going to try putting their dick in a robot, in fact, there are already a number of sex robots on the market if you're so inclined, but it's probably not going to be quick the moral degeneration that a lot of the media seems to think it will be.

Presumably because it makes a good headline, there are countless articles out there foretelling of a time when human interaction is a thing of the past, and we're all merrily bonking our household cyborg instead. These range from the po-faced analyses on how it could be the "cure" for feminism or even the death of intimacy, to the lurid tabloid stories about robot prostitutes that are the perfect excuse to splash pictures of scantily clad robo-ladies across their pages.

There are all kinds of discussions about how sex robots will affect society, young people and even robot rights, but it's all shot through with the pearl-clutching prudishness that led parents to lose their minds over the "sext abbreviations" their teenagers were supposedly using when they found out about "txt spk".

Robot sex and even robot brothels might well feature in the future in some kind of fringe capacity, but it's unlikely to be the society-crumbling epidemic that a lot of people are predicting. The need for human intimacy has weathered worse than this.

The Exception: We could conceivably be able to create a genuine artificial consciousness at some point in the future, at which point we may have to have the debate about, not just robo-sex, but robo-love.