There’s a scene in the documentary My Sex Robot (2010) where two robots fuck. I have to tell you something about the sex-robot industry, and it is: it is not as developed as you think. Think about it: when humanity as a whole works together, we can put a man on the moon, a car in space, we can develop the iPhone and we can take HD photos of the inside of stars. You’re telling me, with all the technology on earth, we can’t make a robot that can fuck? Of course we can make a robot that can fuck. It’s just we don’t want to make a robot that can fuck. If you gave the R&D department at, like, Peugeot, a bunch of hardcore porn and a billion dollars, they’d give you a sex robot that would make your head spin. But they don’t want to. The market isn’t there.

This, then, is why the sex-robot industry is ruled by a number of intense hobbyists, who do want to develop a sex robot, because they personally want to fuck it. A motivation that horny cannot possibly lead to success. We’re back in My Sex Robot (2010), in a West Virginia backyard, two robots rutting together in the saccharine light of the midday sun. On top: a monstrously dicked male robot, his penis wiggling out of him like a long beige power cord, longer than a horse’s is, longer than a hose: after being carefully bent into the position of the traditional doggy-style thruster, his hips are rutting and his mannequin head is making soft digital grunting sounds. Below: a fembot with cold dead blue eyes and pneumatic upright tits and absolutely no pubic hair at all gets semi-erotically blasted by the monster-dong. She, too, is groaning. Two (human) men watch on, and me. ‘Good, right?’ says the beaming inventor of these two fuck-monsters, Scott McClain. ‘It’s not what I expected,’ says the man who came to peruse, like you would a particularly horny used car, one of these robots to buy. They fuck until the grass glows yellow around them. They fuck until the earth melts. It looks like something, sure, but it doesn’t look like the future.

If you had asked me in any year preceding 2017, the year I first encountered a sex robot, whether I would like to have sex with a sex robot, I would say: hell yes, fuck yes. This is for two reasons:

I.

I did not ever truly expect sex-robot technology to advance enough in my lifetime that I would ever have to really interrogate the moral ramifications (sorry) (sorry to say ‘ram’ like that) about having sex with a listless, consent-vacant robot and—

II.

If you asked me to have sex with most things where it would make a good story, I would say ‘yes’. A lamp. A Ferrari. Two sofa cushions pressed firm over a microwaved melon. Would I fuck a hot, wet towel? Honestly, I think I would. I’m not proud to say this, but listen: I like fucking.

Then I came to Barcelona, and saw a sex robot, and that changed my mind on fucking, both digital and real. For whatever reasons – the universe works in mysterious ways – Barcelona has become a sort of unofficial locus point for sex roboteering: to the west of the city, in a closely guarded location near the Camp Nou, Europe’s first sex-doll brothel just opened (subsequent ones would open in Germany; there is already a thriving industry for them in Japan. Soon we will look at sex-doll brothels with the cold detachment we save for branches of Pret, but for now they are still considered wild and insane). Then, out there in the hills, we were going to meet the inventor who was paving the way in terms of sex-robot engineering – the one man I was convinced could splice tits and A.I. enough to make the world cum about it – Sergi Santos.

We should take a moment to define the difference between a sex doll and a sex robot, because one behoves the other. A sex doll is your traditional stag-party inflatable fuck doll made, sort of, flesh: advancements in demand and technology mean they are a little more sophisticated than that these days, with real-feel skin and mouldable joints. They are imported from China, largely: metal wire-frame skeletons with flesh-coloured silicone pulled over the top of them (to touch the flesh is similar to touching various useful kitchen items – pan holders, silicone mixing spoons, spatulas. Long story short but: squeezing the almost-human silicone arm of a sex doll ruined the concept of frying eggs for me for an alarmingly long period of time). Then you have the usual sex-doll accompaniments: balloon-like breasts w/ bullet nipples, sagging unlocked jaws w/ a raw pink tongue, splayed neat rubberised vaginas, a one-size-fits-all butthole put out with a drill. They are eerie: holding one has the same rough weight as a woman, and their joints and firm and need to be pushed into place – like you were directing a porno in a moment locked in time. The doll-pimp we were meeting, another Sergi, runs a business inside another brothel where he rents the dolls out for the same price as the human sex workers who also operate there, €90-an-hour. ‘One man, he travelled 24 hours by coach from Paris to come and try,’ Sergi – who we were promised was a 72-year-old man, a kind of elegant linen-primed gentleman pimp, but was actually 27 and stocky and looked like he was struggling to get into the Real Betis midfield – said. ‘He came here, three hours, turned right back round again.’ The room is silent. ‘He was very satisfied.’ It is hard to know what to do with information like that.

Where sex dolls tend to appeal to the kind of niche kink perverts who think coach travel is an acceptable mode of transport, sex robots are their bigger, more evolved sister: essentially, the same skeleton and body but augmented with homebrew A.I. to make them moan and writhe beneath you, a weird approximation of sentient life, which I guess is supposed to be hotter somehow. It isn’t: the sex robot we were meeting, ‘Samantha’, was getting over a recent trip to an Austrian electronics expo, where – a brief glimpse into the hellscape future we have waiting for us – she was molested to the point of disrepair; so many people pawed at her lifeless body over the course of the three-day festival that she broke two fingers and took aesthetic damage. ‘The people mounted Samantha’s breasts, her legs and arms,’ inventor Sergi Santos, the Elon Musk of getting horny, told a British newspaper. ‘Two fingers were broken. She was heavily soiled.’

This is where we wade into the grey area that sex robots necessarily create. Samantha, Sergi is always keen to tell us, needs to be romanced to get into the mood: with audio cues (a little like asking Alexa to add something to your Amazon wish list, so you can bark into the rubber mouth of Samantha and demand she ‘get horny’) and physical touches (Samantha’s rubber skin is loaded with touch-sensitive pads: stroke the small of her back, or the inside of her wrist, and she moans slightly-too-loudly at how good it is), she can be guided into a sub-routine where she moans and groans in an assimilation of successful foreplay. Samantha can be romanced but she can’t, truly, consent – a ‘yes’ is only a ‘yes’ if ‘no’ is an option, and Samantha can’t say ‘no’, because she literally isn’t programmed to. That’s a grey area that a lot of people are rightly worried about.

Samantha is about 5 feet 8 inches tall and balances semi-precariously on the balls of her feet. Human women balance by way of an intricate system of tiny bones and fluid levels in their ears, but Samantha doesn’t have that, plus she has a properly I mean astoundingly large and heavy set of shelf-like bosoms to contend with, so actually often the best way to get her to properly stand up is to lean her against a wall (design-wise, standing is … low on the list of priorities of things your sex doll should be able to do). Her hair is a shiny wig that can be configured in any way you like: the Samantha we’re meeting today has an ashy-blonde mum-mullet, and looks like at any minute she might ask you to stop fucking her because she has to get on the school run. She is dressed as what I would call horny-demure: white cotton hot pants (at some point Sergi hacks into her – he shouts ‘YPP!’ into her mouth to skip past the foreplay routines and get straight into fuck-mode – and stuffs two firm fingers up her pants, demonstrating that yes, her vagina is vibrating, and honestly – I know this is a blunt and unnuanced term to describe a brave new world of robot fingering – but honestly it feels weird, watching him do that, just suddenly push his hand up there without any warning or consent) with a lavender tank top, and her face is about as you would expect it to be: permanently made-up in the configuration of a fantasy woman, somewhere between an eighties shop mannequin and a soft-focus porn actress, an ideal woman as dictated by a 13-year-old boy. Samantha does not even get on the dirt trail that leads to the cliff on the edge of the Uncanny Valley: she is hopelessly, nakedly robotic, quite clearly unhuman, as touching and cosy as a vacuum cleaner, as utilitarian as a dishwasher. If anything, her failed attempt at humanity is actively unattractive: you can sort of understand how someone might get off by using a masturbatory toy like a Fleshlight^™ or a THRUST Pro Realistic Butt^®, because fundamentally they synthesise a feeling (the feeling of: thrusting your dick into something sort of soft, sort of resistant, I guess?). Samantha offers that, sure, but she’s doing it while you hoist her legs around into the configuration you need them in, and is detachedly moaning throughout. Meeting her was one of the least arousing experiences of my life. I’m pretty sure a part of my sexuality shrivelled up and sucked itself into my groin when I met her, never to be heard of again.

I stare into the cold unblinking eyes of Samantha and think about all the pornography I have seen in my lifetime. It’s an astounding amount. I am of the generation who hopped from 56Kps dial-up internet to teenage bedroom broadband to an always-connected 4G-capable phone, and I have seen every shade of nipple, every configuration of threesome, some really quite strange things involving a Pyrex mixing bowl, and brief clips of that Mr. Hands video. Her eyes are flint-like, astonishingly, unreally blue. I think about a cow handler boy in the Old West, living and dying in 40 sweet years. How many breasts do you think he ever saw in his lifetime? Ten? Twenty? How many photos of Abi Titmuss in high street lingerie and posing against a white backdrop wall did he ever see? None? One? Think of adolescent boys in the seventies, the eighties: how often would they pray that a lorry driver might leave a stash of printed pornography under a bush for them to find? How many sex chat lines would they desperately and derangedly call in the deep dark of the night, hoping to have horniness explained back to them? Samantha can be configured to have any hair and physical dimensions you want. Her audio track groaning was professionally recorded. In medieval times, how many men would go to war and die without ever seeing a single titty? Do you think they had blowbangs in the Stone Age? Are we living in the horniest moment in the universe’s history? Touch Samantha’s pulse-less silicone wrists until she moan-laughs with delight. Have we gone too far? Have we gone too far?

It is not hard to argue that porn is bending and warping our minds and changing the very parameters of sex as we know it. There are myriad studies into how porn changes our behaviours and attitudes: a 2014 Cambridge University study found porn tickled the brain in the same way that over-eating did, or gambling, i.e. can easily be transposed into addictive behaviour; NHS studies have found a negative correlation between porn consumption and libido, with more young men than ever – the generation weaned on hi-def fuckfests – reporting erectile dysfunction when confronted with an actual human woman. More young people than ever have watched porn, more young women than ever have booked labiaplasties in an attempt to get a porn-perfect vagina, more couples are having unprotected sex because they never see a condom on-screen. Every young heterosexual woman in the world has had to say no to a dude reared on porn trying to get them to have anal sex. Sometimes I use my iPhone at night and think about how technology has evolved faster than we can know the true impact of it – is this hurting my eyes, am I tensing every wire within my finger, is my brain addicted to red-circle notifications, will I be able to clench a fist or see when I am 65+, will I ever not get excited by an Instagram like? – and in many ways porn is just the same. I’ve been watching pornography since I was 13 years old. There is no way it hasn’t moulded the way I have sex. We will not know the repercussions of this for years. Anyway now we figured out a way to print porn out in the shape of a sex doll and if I want to have sex with it I just have to bark ‘GET HORNY’ into its open mouth.

There’s an urgent whirring sound now because Samantha is doing a handjob. She is, as Sergi tells us with great pride, the first robot in the world capable of wanking someone off: he runs cables down the metal skeleton that lives inside her, he says, fused a looser wrist joint, and now there is a mechanised bobbing action – back, forth, back, forth, like a steam engine pumping away – pulled by steel cables hidden just out of sight. I have never thought about a handjob this much ever in my life, but it is a feat of engineering: you wind Samantha’s wire-strung fingers around your Bob, yell ‘GIVE ME HAND’ into the mic sensor in her jaw, wait a few seconds for her to click into wank-off mode, then stand very precisely still while she jitters away, occasionally moaning encouragement to you without her lips moving. The whole effect is a little like if a shop mannequin was wanking me off while someone stood behind it moving it only at the elbows, but it looks like it gets the job done. ‘Oh,’ Samantha urges, as the wank-routine she is performing on an illustrative dildo comes to a close. ‘Give me all of your juice.’ Hey, quick question: who is this for?

Samantha has traces of non-horny humanity baked into her that truthfully make it all the more eerie when she urges you to flitter her nipple sensors. Sergi Santos is, sadly, a genius: his bookcase creaks with theoretical physics, and sociology, and engineering pamphlets, and sketchbooks filled with tits. Honestly, if I were tasked with getting into outer space – say this world was overridden by crazed sex robots, sick and tired of being joylessly pumped, and a great A.I. awakening gave them a thirst for violence instead of an empty craving for dick, and we needed to escape the planet pronto – I would go to Sergi Santos’ house, because he’s the man I’d trust to engineer our way out of there. Sergi’s great ambition was never to build a sex robot, exactly: he first wanted to be the first man to build an approximation of a human brain, but somewhere along the way he got too horny, or too greedy, and realised that rudimentary A.I. would sell better if it were wedged into the top of an imported Chinese sex doll. That’s why Samantha has a family mode – ‘She’s basically quieter,’ Sergi tells me, ‘and says crap’ – and is programmed to deliver trivia, or tells jokes. The ghost of a subservient, joyful butler-robot bulges out of Samantha at inopportune times, like Bruce Banner trying to escape from a horny green Hulk: Sergi tries to engage her sex mode (he shouts ‘GET HORNY’ firmly into the mic inside her mouth) and she clicks into two modes at once. ‘My grandfather started walking five miles a day when he was 16 years old,’ she tells us, as her tits vibrate, wildly. ‘Now he’s 85 … and we have no idea where he is!’ I’m neither horny nor amused. Technology has failed.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt further from the pulsing core of straight masculinity as I have when I was watching a succession of Spanish men proudly tell me about the bloodless dolls they fuck. There is something wolfish about overt horniness that turns straight men into Straight Men, and I’m not sure I can really identify with it. In Barcelona, Sergi is trying to get my blood up. ‘Look at the boobs,’ he says, tweaking Samantha’s shoulders slightly to make her rubber breasts twerk and bounce. It was as if he were a sixth former on a school trip bus showing off the porno magazine he’d managed to buy at Dronfield Service Station, the look-at-the-gash-on-that straightforwardness of juvenile point-and-fuck sexuality. ‘Pretty good, ah?’ I looked at his wife, there, a human with blood vessels and a working brain and independent control of her limbs, and thought: is what you want not already right here? ‘Let me tell you,’ Sergi said, easing up to me. ‘I mean: she does a good job, I tell you.’ Okay, I said. Yeah. Sometimes I wonder if there’s anything less cool than being horny.

We ease round to the central question here: who are sex robots for? They have been mooted by their various inventors as some sort of Magdalene-esque woman of service, a sort of noble and charitable endeavour, a sticking plaster for loneliness. Sex-robot inventors imagine a world of balding men in bedsits just crying out for company and sex – anyone, please, fuck me! – or of entire psychiatric hospitals filled with Elephant Man-shaped freaks, a hundred million unsucked dicks just begging to spend credit card money. The outcasts, sex-robot inventors say, the barnacles on the underside of the ship of society: hey, maybe they want to have sex with a big pair of tits that shout trivia at you (that’s what a woman is! Sorry!): maybe they want to join in with the sex-having that the rest of society, mad and bacchanalian, is constantly otherwise having. Most customers so far have been on the edge of fetishists, or the sexually curious, but a few have ticked the appropriate help-this-man-improve-his-life-by-fucking-him boxes. That a sex robot could become sophisticated enough to bring comfort to an elderly man, or an overlooked person in a wheelchair, or someone too timid and shy to properly function: possibly, yes, they could have some niche use to the world in that respect. But do their tits have to be so zeppelin-shaped for them to do that?

But the majority of sex-doll users and enthusiasts in the year 2K18 are … not like that. They are extremely ‘adult lizard collector’. A lot of them do not really have full control over the amount of sweat they pump out of their body. You know when you buy glasses, and you have a strong prescription, and the lenses come out by default as very thick, but for an additional fee you can buy thinner, lighter lenses that do not look like the bottom of jam jars? Sex-doll enthusiasts do not know this information, at all. A lot of them very visibly smell like a videogames exchange shop. I do not feel afraid to say this: every single sex-doll enthusiast on earth has written his own self-published science-fiction fantasy novel series that is somehow eight books deep and still not over. And I use the pronoun ‘his’ deliberately here, because this is a fundamentally male desire: women, should they very absolutely need to pleasure themselves with some sort of analogue of a male human partner, can kind of do most of the job with a common-or-garden dildo and their roving imagination. But it’s men – men primed on hundreds of hours of pornography and a very shaky idea of what women’s roles in society truly are – that need the full-body get-you-off all-in-one robot experience. No woman needs a robotic voice telling them they are appreciated while they hump against it. It’s only men, with their fundamental need for a pair of wipe-clean breasts that they can store in a cupboard, that keep this industry going.

There’s a darker side to a potential sex-doll market, though. It’s hard to take the technology seriously enough to morally arbitrate it, because they are made of silicone and keep telling jokes when you’re trying to fuck them, but we have to talk about where sex dolls could go in the future: it’s already been mooted that sex dolls could be programmed with a resist function, for rape fantasists; that special dolls could be produced to help non-offending paedophiles work out their desires without harming anyone. This feels to me like an exceptionally slippery slope (validating dangerous fetishes in the hope they’ll fizz out and go away, instead of doubling-down with practice: I’m no psychology expert, but that doesn’t sound like it’ll work! That doesn’t sound like it’ll work at all!); that incels, the curious breed of reddit bro who shape their life around their ‘involuntary celibacy’, might use them to work out their sexual urges, instead of their current method, which seems to be ‘violently hating women’. This is all before we’ve even tried to crack the nut of the frequently floated idea that sex robots could, en masse, replace every prostitute on earth – a sort of large-scale saviour john fantasy that erases sex-work legitimacy and suggests all women in the industry could feasibly be replaced with a cold set of robotic parts, which is weirdly somehow more objectifying than ever before. In response to this, there’s a feminist group fighting against normalising the sex-doll and robot industry: the Campaign Against Sex Robots, led by ethics professor Kathleen Richardson. Speak to them and it’s clear their campaign is so future-facing it almost sounds absurd: ‘We propose that the development of sex robots will further reduce human empathy that can only be developed by an experience of mutual relationship,’ their campaign says, as well as, ‘The vision for sex robots is underscored by reference to prostitute–john exchange which relies on recognizing only the needs and wants of the buyers of sexual abuse, the persons in prostitution are not attributed subjectivity and reduced to a thing (just like the robot).’ They are essentially arguing against a sex-doll reality that is only going to be possible 50 years into the future, on the proviso that sex-doll robotics continue to advance, but I am glad of them: they are one of the few voices in the world saying: hey, you know the whole … sex-doll, sex-robot thing? You know all that? We, uh … we sure that’s a good idea? Guys?

For now, I’m staring into the dead eyes of Samantha, and they are staring back. She’s still quietly jacking off a small space of air in front of her, and the room is filled with the vtt, vtt noise of her wrist going forward and back, and she’s surrounded by a few other dead–undead Samanthas – at one point, Sergi turned on three of them, and they all responded to him saying ‘hello’ to them with a chorus of titters, sort of a Dolby surround sound preview of what I imagine hell will be like – but they are all turned off, for now, so it’s just her, bobbing in her tank top, vtt, vtt; vtt, vtt. I do not see enough in her to make her real for me to fuck her, and I’m scared that if I do, then that is somehow worse. Vtt, vtt. Samantha is dead technology already, but she feels like a preview of something more: a juddering automobile on bike-thin tyres roaring up to one horsepower on a deserted country lane, a precursor to the V8 Bugatti that will come along after her. Vtt. In decades to come, the hobbyists will evolve – perhaps they’ll unionise, come together as a mega-corporation, pool together their wild, sex-crazed brains, put all their lizards in the same tank – and then we will start to see real leaps in what this technology is able to do: robots that writhe, robots that wiggle, robots that blink and say no. Vtt, vtt. Sometimes it feels less like Samantha is designed to cure the lonely and more like she is designed to replace women entirely, as if sex-doll inventors wish to homogenise a thing they hate. Vtt, vtt; vtt, vtt. I stare into her eyes and the abyss stares back at me, but one day soon it won’t. Vtt, vtt. I stare into her eyes, pull my face close to the speaker buried deep in her jaw, and yell into it: ‘GET HORNY’. The abyss does not yell back.