“Let’s talk about sex, baby. Let’s talk about you and me,” sang 1980s US hip hop trio Salt-N-Pepa. The intricately crafted lyrics don’t give us any hints as to who they’re singing to, but it’s very unlikely that they had a robot in mind when penning the hit.

Instead of just humans being the focus of our sexual attentions robots are set to also come into the equation.

If you can’t find a human partner suitable to your tastes, then it’s going to be increasingly possible to adjust your standards – either upwards or downwards, we’re not judging here – and opt for a robotic romance.

Don’t just take our word for it either: There are plenty of people who predict that intimate robot-human relationships will become a thing in the future.

“Robotic sex partners will be a commonplace, although the source of scorn and division – in the way that critics today bemoan selfies as an indicator of all that’s wrong with the world,” said Stowe Boyd in a Pew Research Center report that asked experts what digital life would be like in 2025.

Indeed, the world’s first ‘sex robot’, Roxxxy (the triple Xs were probably a little unnecessary), was announced in 2010 at the Adult Entertainment Expo, complete with a demonstration of how she could engage with the owner, verbally, in a range of unprintable situations.

But it isn’t just about intimacy. Artificial intelligence is making robots smarter; they’re already starting to be involved in personal care, they’ll be around our houses, we’ll interact with them during most of our waking hours and become comfortable with their presence.

Essentially we’ll be creating new relationships with the robots we own. But how far will these relationships go?

The challenge of acceptance

The idea of being in a relationship with robots, both in physical and emotional terms, isn’t one that is at all out of our cultural awareness. You don’t have to look far into the genres of sci-fi and dystopia to find examples. In fact, they’ve become common in everyday culture: the rebellious Sonny from i, Robot, Pixar’s adorable Wall-E, SICO in Rocky IV, Tron – the list goes on.

As the mainstream acceptance of the idea of living alongside robots grows, it’s very unlikely that we’re not going to let them into our lives in a massive way. The number of robots that have been developed by researchers is colossal and they all have different purposes.

The whole reason we study artificial intelligence is because most of us look in the mirror and find ourselves kind of a mysterious thing

A large number of them be considered to be humanoids – robots that resemble humans in some way. The creations shown off at DARPA’s robotics challenge a couple of weeks ago shows just how advanced they have become. They can drive, open doors, walk, climb stairs – and one even managed to get up once it had taken a tumble.

This desire to recreate ourselves in robotic form is partly down to a God complex and wanting to work out how we function as humans, according to Eric Matson, a researcher at Purdue University.

“The whole reason we study artificial intelligence is because most of us look in the mirror and find ourselves kind of a mysterious thing. We don’t understand how people think, we don’t understand the brain, we don’t understand the whole idea of consciousness, the soul or the whole idea of rationality,” Matson said. “I think with a humanoid robot we’re trying to do the same thing. We want to sort of take on the task of building something that replaces us functionally. How do we really function? And can we replicate that functionality?”

“To me it is a physical extension to why people have studied AI so vigorously over the last 50 years. We want to understand the human brain and now we want to apply that to something that looks and feels and sounds like a human and someday has the same emotions, has the same lack of rationality and all the good and bad that some with that.”

So why not love?

In his book Love and Sex with Robots, back in 2007, British artificial intelligence expert David Levy said that within 40 years we would be able to end up falling in love with robots. To an extent this has already happened.

Japanese owners of the Aibo robot dog held funerals for their pets when Sony announced that they would no longer be offering to produce the parts to repair them. They might not be humans, or human-like in the way Roxxxy is, but owners had formed an emotional relationship with their robotic pet. There’s no real reason why this cannot transfer to humanoid robots.

The problems, other than technological ones, include the fact that robots are still at an arm’s length to humans.

“As intelligence gets better as emotion and all those things that humans typically carry as part of their domain become part of a robot, how do we draw these entities closer?” Matson said. “Part of that, I look at from necessity.

The boundaries, if there are to be any, will have to be defined.

“So if you think of China or some Asian nations, because of the one child policies and the preference for males which you have in some places, there is such a huge number more males of marrying age than females. How do you fill that gap? People have theorised that one of the solutions is robots. Could you have a robotic mate 50 years in the future?”

But when it comes to marrying and loving a robot there will be questions around how we interact with them and how we treat them. At present the ball is in mostly in the arena of the technologists building the robots and the artificial intelligence, who are setting the levels of what can be achieved and how we interact with their creations.

However, as we become familiar with robots and they hit the mass markets it’s likely that the debates around this will change. It won’t just be the engineers who are determining what a robot can do.

That’s when lawmakers and politicians are likely to become involved and big questions will need to be answered. As humans we’re capable of loving objects that we know aren’t fundamentally real – people get attached to their mobile phones, their sportswear, so why not robots? The boundaries, if there are to be any, will have to be defined.

“For instance if you had a robot as wife and you decided you didn’t like that robot anymore could you switch it off, pull the batteries and kill it? Is that technically murder or are you just switching off a machine?” Matson said. “There’s a lot of things about debates that mainstream philosophers and sociologists care about more than computer scientists.”