Ian Pearson Predicted Women Would Ditch Men For Sex Robots by 2025?

Ian Pearson is a respected futurologist who often makes predictions about the world of sex tech. One of his bold predictions concerning sex robots, made back in 2015, is now being revisited by many online news sites. That’s because his prediction was that within 10 years women would start to prefer sex robots in favor of men.

Now with 2025 around the corner, a number of news sites online have been referring back to that astonishing claim. However, it appears they have twisted Pearson’s claim into something he did not say – that by 2025 women will have ditched men in favor of sex robots.

I’ve read a few of Ian Pearson’s predictions and speculations upon the future, both for the world of porn and sex tech, as well as society in general. They have always seemed to me quite reasonable and clearly based upon a well-researched knowledge and understanding of the subject. His predictions about sex robots that are currently being regurgitated and misquoted, appear to have been published in a paper entitled ‘The Rise of the Robosexuals’, sponsored by Bondara – a now defunct online sex toy retailer. Not only is Bondara gone, but so it appears is Ian Pearson’s homepage. Thus, I haven’t been able to track the original paper and read it in full.

At the time, the paper was widely reported on in tabloids such as The Daily Express. Even then it was being sensationalized as a prediction that women would be preferring sex with robots within 10 years. But what he appears to have actually said is that high-income groups would start to use sex robots by 2025, and that it would increasingly be seen as normal, as well as trickling down to lower income groups as the costs came down. For example, this appears to be a direct quote from the paper published in that 2016 Express article.

“A lot of people will still have reservations about sex with robots at first but gradually as they get used to them, as the AI and mechanical behaviour and their feel improves, and they start to become friends with strong emotional bonds, that squeamishness will gradually evaporate, 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.”

Looking back at the prediction, we can obviously say that it appears woefully off the mark. Literally nobody is having sex with robots, because sex robots still aren’t a thing, and the closest we have come is ‘smart sex dolls’ equipped with basic AI conversational speech and not much else.

However, sex robots may not be so very far off, giving the rapid progress being made with humanoid robots, and industry expectations that they could actually start to appear in people’s homes, as well as factories and other places, within the next year or two. Pearson’s prediction that by 2050, sex with robots will be completely normalized and even more popular than human sex, may well be possible, although it’s still way too early to state it with confidence.

Back in 2015, it did appear that sex robots were on the horizon, with RealDoll hyping up their sex doll head that could converse to a limited extent, and in a thick Scottish accent. There were also the even more dubious likes of Sergio Santos and his ‘Samantha’ that was supposedly so hot it was ‘molested at a tech fair‘. But whilst ‘sex robots’ themselves have made little or no progress in terms of physical movement, we have witnessed the recent rapid explosion in generative AI and conversational chatbots, leading to an almost immediate parallel explosion in the popularity of sexchat bots and AI companion services.

It seems all the leading sex tech ‘futurologists’ were blindsided by this development, thinking that the AI of getting a heavy physical sex robot to move around and perform sex actions was going to be a lot easier than giving it lifelike conversational speech. For example, David Levy (author of ‘Love and Sex with Robots‘) predicted in 2008 that sex robots would arrive a few years later. Despite this, he was pessimistic about AI conversation, despite himself creating a company with the goal of doing just that (seemingly abandoned before the recent AI chat breakthroughs). Here is a quote from him apparently made in 2015:

He said: “I have always felt conversation and speech recognition are the two hardest aspects of AI, but I did anticipate it would only be a matter of years before the first crude sex doll came onto the market.

I also recall reading a prediction of his that AI chatbots able to make natural conversation wouldn’t appear until at least 2035, or even later. This all seems even a little ridiculous with the benefit of hindsight, and it gives us reason to treat sex tech predictions with a healthy dose of scepticism.

Despite all this, both Pearson and Levy were on track if you consider the present AI companions to be disembodied ‘sex robots’, and it does appear only a matter of time before they start to become embodied. Earlier this year, a sex tech fair in China highlighted AI companions that could control sex toys.

“You can ask the AI to control your toy,” said Hultman. “You create your own girlfriend and actually interact. And now you can basically touch your body through the toy.”

Adult AI companions are being normalized (despite frequent media scare stories) and are enjoyed regularly by increasing millions of people around the world. What’s more, they are proving to be very popular with women too, perhaps even more so than among men in certain parts of the world, such as China. In 2025, we may even start to see these AI companions take on something of a mechanical form, even if only AI controlled sex toys.

Ian Pearson is certainly not afraid to make bold and original predictions. He has also claimed that by 2050, parents might prefer ‘virtual children’ which could be seen and interacted with through augmented reality, and might even be based upon their DNA.