‘She cooks as good as she looks, Ted,” says Walter Eberhart in the 1975 movie The Stepford Wives, marvelling at the robot replacement for Ted’s human spouse. In Blade Runner in 1982 Harrison Ford simply terminates the pleasure replicant Zhora but ends up running off with another robot – Rachael. The movies have always been big on sexbots, but now they’re coming to the real world.

Visit the websites of Honey Dolls and Real Doll – probably not safe to do this at work – and you will be startled by two things. First, there is the profound difference between Japanese and American ideals of sexiness – Honey is Japanese, Real is American. And, second, you will be impressed by the progress we have made in constructing artificial lovers.

Recently, Honey Dolls has even added sensors to its dolls’ nipples. The dolls moan enticingly when they are touched.

“That’s the first example of the kind of thing I am talking about,” says David Levy excitedly.

“There are quite a few technologies around that could be integrated into these upmarket sex dolls.”

We are at the beginning, Levy believes, of a process that will lead us in about 2050 to the widespread availability of robot lovers and carers: machines that will look, act and talk like humans. Levy’s new book – Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships – is the road map to that eerie future. It is an unsensational work, a rounded cultural, historical and technological survey of why robosex is the way of the future. In its academic form – Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners – it earned him a PhD in Holland.

Can human relationships survive robot love gods/goddesses? And who are these robots anyway? Do they have rights? Will they, in a relationship, have emotional needs that we must respect?

I find myself discussing all this with Levy, 63, in his modest flat in Hampstead, where he lives with two cats and his wife Christine. At least at first, he thinks, the primary function of the machines will be to satisfy the needs of the sexually deprived.

“There must be a huge number of people who may have social problems or be shy or have psychosexual hang-ups . . . people who are lonely and miserable and don’t have a normal sex life . . . I don’t see anything wrong with it if the kind of robot I am talking about brings more pleasure to society. That’s a good thing.”

He speaks methodically – not surprising, considering his background. Having learnt chess at the age of eight, he went on to become an international master. At university, he studied computer science and met Donald Michie, who had worked on code-cracking during the war with the great mathematician Alan Turing and then became the godfather of artificial intelligence (AI) research in Britain.

Levy subsequently wrote more than 30 books on chess and worked on computer chess programs. In 1968 he challenged AI researchers to beat him at chess; he wasn’t defeated until 1989 (by Deep Thought). In 1997 he won the Loebner prize for a program that simulated human speech.

Now president of the International Computer Games Association, Levy has a small company called Intelligent Toys, which is working on talking dolls, and runs his own computing consultancy. Since Love and Sex with Robots came out in America, he has found himself on the world chat circuit. This has included a long, serious spot on the Arab answer to CNN, Al-Jazeera.

The book formed in his mind when he read The Second Self, by Sherry Turkle, a leading commentator on the virtual world. In it she had mentioned a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student who had tried to have girlfriends but preferred relationships with computers. “I thought if someone who is a student at MIT – and therefore highly intelligent – could feel this way, there must be a huge number of people who feel the same,” Levy says.

Leaving aside the social and ethical implications, the most obvious objection to his sexbots is that they need at least to behave intelligently if they are to work as lovers. Yet, since AI began in the 1950s, its progress has been deeply unspectacular.

“You’re right. But when you have far more computing power, new techniques will suggest themselves that weren’t possible with the old technology.”

Faster chips and larger memories will mean that, by 2050, computers and robots will be able to engage in convincing conversations. This may not mean they are conscious like us, possessed of an inner life – but that, says Levy, doesn’t matter. If they appear to be conscious then we must – shall – assume they are.

But wouldn’t knowing that they were just behaving, rather than thinking, take the fun out of a robot love affair? “I have a debate with my wife over this. She says [a robot] doesn’t have a soul or consciousness, so how can it be creative? My argument is if you went to the Festival Hall and were blindfolded, and then heard the most fantastic performance on the piano you’d ever heard, and then removed the blindfold to see there was just an object the size of a matchbox on the stage, does that diminish the joy we had when we experienced the music? I say it wouldn’t.”

In other words, great music is great music and great sex is great sex. Why bring consciousness or the soul into it?

Pets, vibrators and prostitution support his case. We have no evidence of any inner life or consciousness in our pets, but they behave in ways that convince us they have – whereas, in fact, these behaviours have been bred into them over generations. It is enough: people fall in love with their pets.

Machine sex is already in the mass market – vibrators are commonplace. Finally, prostitution – its true scale is unknown, but we can assume it is a far bigger business than anybody admits – shows that sexual expertise that may involve the pretence of affection floats many boats.

It is the market, of course, that will drive the creation of sexbots. Levy says that the “adult entertainment” industry, worth $57 billion (£28.6 billion) a year worldwide, is already beginning to lead the way. In Japan sex dolls are known as “Dutch wives” – and one escort agency has started using them instead of real women, sending them round to hotel rooms for an hour at a time. In Korea there is a hotel that provides them with every room.

“The industry is going to realise the value of putting electronics into these dolls. It may push the cost up from the $5,000-$10,000 range to $15,000-$20,000. But once that happens – once you have some vibrating parts, sensors for when you caress the erogenous zones, speech to tell the guy what a wonderful lover he is – I think the market will expand very rapidly.”

Perhaps, darling, we need to talk.

Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, by David Levy, is published by Duckworth at £12.99

www.bryanappleyard.com

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