10 Times Futurama Eerily Predicted The Future
2. Sex Robots & Deepfakes
In Season 3, when Fry realised that he had seen relatively little of the future compared to what was actually out there, the crew took him to get, among other things, a robotic girlfriend. After downloading the likeness of Lucy Liu and the personality mix of her movie characters, Fry became obsessed with his new robot.
Since this episode released in 2001, the world has seen a huge leap in this particular industry, with sex dolls becoming more and more realistic, with some even being manufactured to resemble celebrities. Though not quite on the same level as Fry's Lucy Liu-bot, the show certainly saw the advancements in this field before anybody else, and the potential implications of stealing the likeness of such celebrities.
In the show this is exaggerated to a hoard of robots attacking New New York, but the message and the sentiment goes much deeper, as these real world people truly are at risk of having their images and their identities stolen and violated by the internet.
Even before this, Season 2 saw the internet of the future containing a series of deepfakes, something that no one else could have even dreamed of at the time. This trend has - quite horrifically - seen videos get edited to replace the actors' faces with that of various celebrities. Futurama was way ahead of this curve back in 20 years ago, as Bender littered the internet with images of Amy's face edited onto Leela's naked body.