One of the first feature articles I wrote for Reason was about sex robots. This was 2015, and both legacy and social media had cyclical freak-outs about the havoc that sex robots would supposedly wreak. By sex robots, I—and everyone else at the time—meant anthropomorphic robots that were able to be physically intimate with humans and perhaps romantic, too. The gist of my piece was basically calm down—sex robots as people are imagining them don't actually exist, they won't for a while, and even if they eventually do, it's going to be OK.
Now sex robots are here. We're seeing the rise of artificially intelligent "chatbot" companions and they are capable of both romance and naughty talk, from the G-rated to the pornographic.
