When news of the "first oral sex robot" made the rounds last week, the headlines and tweets came alongside photos of sexy silicone faces with lips parted and eyes painted into come-hither stares. But when you click through to photos of the actual “Autoblow” robot, what you see looks more like a Wi-Fi router with benefits.

So it tends to go with sex robots, where the moral panic and/or misogynist jubilation about the looming replacement of women has long run far ahead of reality.

The idea of sex machines as technological comeuppance for women who dared declare their liberation has grown alongside the boom in misogynist online media. In these fantasies, Western women will be made irrelevant by the widespread adoption of sex robots, made to serve men and constructed according to each man's specifications.

But here’s the bad news for the men dreaming of a sexbot that will give them what women are less inclined to: it’s not happening. As BuzzFeed’s Scaachi Koul noted in her “Sexbots” episode of Follow This, this year’s big step forward in sex tech is "Harmony," a robotic head that can be attached to a sex doll body. Basically a blinking Siri whose "personality" traits you can choose via app, Harmony is as close as we've come so far to consumer sexbot. And she's more Tamagotchi than Westworld.

Technology will advance, of course. But even then, there is little to suggest that sexbots will be more than a fascinating "niche," as Kate Devlin, author of the 2018 book Turned On: Science, Sex, and Robots, puts it. This is also what I found when researching sex robots and interviewing their owners back in 2015. And it is essentially the same conclusion reached by Love and Sex With Robots author David Levy more than a decade ago.

What kind of people will use sexbots? Based on sex doll trends, we can expect several subtypes. There will certainly be some of your "Men Going Their Own Way" (MGTOW) types, those who see sex robots as a way around the problem of women's inconvenient humanity. And there will be fetishists — those for whom the synthetic and robotic elements are the appeal. In a recent survey from sex toy site Eden's Fantasy, 4% of people who said they would have sex with a robot said they didn't want it to look like a human.