From Forbes.com
Predictions abound of a Westworld-style near future, where sex robots are “normal” and holiday resorts offering sex dolls and x-rated androids operate in every city. The first signs? Barcelona has just become home to Europe’s first sex-dolls agency.
Katy, the “European” Lumidoll, is 5’6″ tall and available for €120 ($127) per hour. Photo: Lumi Dolls
Promoting itself as the first of its kind, Lumi Dolls offers four models of extremely realistic, large-breasted silicone dolls on its website: European Kati, blond with big lips and piercing green eyes, Asian Lili, African Leiza and blue-haired Aki, modeled after Japanese anime.
A session with one doll is around €120 per hour and the cost of each doll is $5,500.
“They are totally realistic dolls both in their movements and in their “feel,” and they will allow you to fulfill all your fantasies without limits,” the website promises.
“Such sex dolls have already proved a huge hit in Japan and China – especially with husbands working away from home who want to avoid being unfaithful,” writes The Local.
To make the experience “more pleasant and erotic,” the new business offers to dress and position the doll according to the client’s desires, and in a private room where said client can listen to sensual music or watch pornography on a big plasma television.
Lily, the Asian-themed doll. Photo: Lumi Dolls
A recent international congress at the University of London, “Love and Sex With Robots,” attracting experts from around the world, considered the future of societies where sex robots will be the new normal.
The conference reflects a new market that engineers and programmers are working hard to meet, creating dolls programmed to display moods and emotions—and that will be ready this year for about $15,000.
“Sex with humans could soon be a thing of the past,” the German magazine Spiegel wrote in an article in the report “The Future of Sex” by the British mathematician and physicist Ian Pearson, who “draws a future in which robotic brothels and strip clubs with computer-controlled dancers are normal.”
The Spiegel article muses that the robots made of metal, silicone and software “could satisfy customers’ needs and linger indefatigably. The robots are always horny.”
A much-reported example is “Harmony,” a cyborg expected to soon hit the market and created by Realdoll, a California-based company, that will allow the user to design the machine’s personality.
“Realdoll is building a fleet of AI-powered sex robots with customizable personalities” writes Digital Trends.
Harmony reportedly can incorporate any of 12 personality traits according to the specifications of the owner including kindness, shyness, naïveté, intellectualism, wit and sensuality.
In its website Realdoll informs that costumers can choose from a large variety of dolls body options including skin tone, hair style and color, specific genitalia, piercing, custom freckles among others. There are also male robot models.
“The system itself will be available via an app that costs just $20 a year to subscribe to, but the sex robot will not be a cheap date, with just the head of a doll costing upwards of $10,000,” according to Express.
Realdoll CEO Matt McMullen told the magazine they have sold more than 5,000 non-robotic sex dolls since 1996. “Our clients will be able to talk to their dolls, and the Harmony AI will learn about them over time through these interactions, thus creating an alternative form of relationship,” he said. “The scope of conversations possible with the AI is quite diverse, and not limited to sexual subject matter.”
When such sex androids hit the market, many speculate they will revolutionize many other businesses – among them the sex tourism and travel industries.
“Sex robots holiday resorts soon will be taking the world,” The Sun enthused, citing a study by Sydney-based sexologist Michelle Mars. “Markets for particular kinds of experiences or particular ‘models’ of android will be available at different destinations.”
Like Barcelona’s, but with dolls enhanced by artificial intelligence it’s reasonable to expect such holiday resorts could become popular tourist destinations.
