Dr Ian Pearson is a notable futurist who stands out from most in that a lot of his predictions have been about sex tech. As the last year came to a close, one of his predictions from a decade ago about sex with robots in 2025, which was widely reported on at the time by bestselling British tabloids such as The Sun and the Star, resurfaced and went even more viral than it had the first time. Viral, because the prediction seemed spectacularly wrong. It was widely reported that Pearson had made the bold claim that women would be having more sex with robots than with men by 2025, something that has obviously not come about – leading to many jokes and memes on social media involving disappointment and fury over the lack of sexbot action.
Only, he never said that sex with robots would be more common than with humans by 2025 at all. He simply said that some people may be having sex with robots by 2025, and it could be more common than human-human sex by the middle-of-the-century. In fact, he explicitly stated that robot sex would NOT be more common by 2025.
[Quote]While some people will enthusiastically embrace relationship-free robot sex as soon as they can afford one, as early as 2025, it won’t have much chance of overtaking sex with humans overall until 2050.”[/Quote]
I reported this two weeks ago when I came to the defence of Dr Ian Pearson at my other sex tech blog FutureSexTech.com. Always an honour and a duty to defend the reputation of a fellow sex tech futurist. And now, Ian Pearson himself has swiped back against his misinformed critics, likewise pointing out that he said only that we would begin to have sex with robots by 2025, and that robosex could overtake human sex by 2050.
In an interview with ‘KnowYourMeme’ published last week, he also doubled down on the prediction that he did make a decade ago – that people will be having sex with robots in 2025. Pearson notes that we appear to be on the precipice of a boom in household humanoid robots from companies such as Tesla, with the first generation of these androids set to enter people’s homes this year. Pearson believes that some kinky owners will find ways to get up to naughty stuff with their robot servants, even if it requires ‘attaching’ things to them.
Despite radio silence, Dr. Ian Pearson has not forgotten about his viral prediction. “The technology is virtually here already,” he said on an exclusive call with us this week. “There are two or three companies that are bringing out household robots next year to fetch and carry. I know some people who are sufficiently kinky, who will be quite happy with that. And so I think it probably will start next year.
Dr. Pearson believes that these models “don’t need to be designed as sex robots for people to play with them.” The earliest form of robotic sex partners will be these fetch-and-carry models that people will “attach devices to … to make them do other things too.”
“I would think that people would adapt them,” he said on the subject. “It won’t be very many weeks after they come out at a reasonable cost before someone starts making kits for them that allow you to misuse them.”
A simple crotch attachment could be paired with other AI systems which, over the past year, have had seemingly exponential advances. AI-generated voices, chatbots like ChatGPT, plus video and image generating systems allude to a possible combination of everything, according to Dr. Pearson, that could be used for sexual purposes.”
Ian Pearson also talked in the interview about an invention or idea of his way back in 2001 that he called ‘active skin’, and that would fuse human skin with electronics, and be linked to the person’s nervous system. This could have some very sexy uses, including providing biofeedback to a sex robot partner which could then adjust their own actions. Pearson also claims it could lead to memorable sex being recorded and ‘replayed’. Pornstars and OnlyFans models could also sell their ‘sexbot archive’ to be downloaded and experienced by fans.
One future possibility that Dr. Pearson noted is celebrities or models selling their rights to a sexbot archive. This dark, OnlyFans evolution is “perfectly easy to do that with LED displays,” he noted. “Some celebrities might upload a library of ‘This is what it’s like to be in bed with me’ and you can download sensations that these people are able to produce,” transferred through something like Active Skin.
That’s only a 2050 possibility though. Start worrying this year if your partner can afford a Tesla Bot and the theoretical “add-ons” that Dr. Pearson might call a “teledildonic device.”
The full interview can be found at KnowYourMeme.
