SEX robots could become as common as e-books and PlayStations within the next 50 years and feed back information on your sexual desires to their makers.

That’s according to experts at the second annual Love, Sex with Robots conference held in London who said the next generation of sexual machines could “learn” sexual behaviour.

Goldsmith’s Professor Kate Devlin said there is huge potential for robots to collect information from their users and she could even envisage her daughter marrying a robot one day.

“If you’ve got a robot lover who’s absolutely amazing and you form an attachment with them, there’s nothing wrong with continuing that relationship,” she said.

“I don’t think that’s problematic at all. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It sounds like really quite a nice thing.

“If that robot made her happy and she was in a supported relationship it’s very far-fetched that it will happen but I don’t see anything wrong with it. I don’t see what the problem is.”

While it’s early days in the $30 billion sex tech industry covering everything from virtual reality to apps, she said there was “a lot to be learned” from reams of data companies may be able to collect in the not-too-distant future.

“Some things are already tracking your data. I have a friend who says Smartwatch can tell when he does rapid wrist movements,” she joked.

“There are issues, but to ban this development would be very shortsighted. I’m wary, I wouldn’t say everything is utopian but I don’t necessarily think it’s going to be a terrible thing and I don’t think we’ll be first against the wall come the singularity.”

The second conference of its kind attracted academics and activists for the nearly $400 a head event that covered everything from 3D cinema technology for the ultimate group experience to ethical questions on whether robots should be forced to remind people they are in fact robots.

Former artist and University of Portsmouth Professor Trudy Barber has been studying the intersection of sex and technology since 1991 and said complete integration between humans and machines is inevitable.

“We’re all attached to our mobile phones, these are our repository of our personal histories … It’s inevitable that we will project ourselves onto whatever the technology will be, whether it’s the robot you tinker about with in the garage or a synthetic robot you want to take out for dinner.”

Having seen homemade contraptions in UK homes for the past two decades she said we’re now “at the cusp” of major changes and should be thinking creatively about what comes next.

“What will happen probably is that it will make your real time relationships actually more valuable and exciting,” she said, using the analogy of e-books and how they have made regular books more valuable.

“With the kind of tech I’m talking about it will be part of another choice …. it would be an alternative sex. It will be part of the gamut of all types of future engagement.”

ETHICAL QUESTIONS

Experts also provided an insight into the myriad of ethical questions that accompanies the machines. Things like should robots be able to refuse? Should they remind humans they are only machines? Should child-like or politically incorrect versions be made?

Who is responsible for injury or contamination? Should companies be able to keep data on your sexual preferences? In the case of the Scarlett Johansson version recently created, who owns the rights to your image?

Swiss expert in machine morality Oliver Bendel, who is also making a self-cleaning vacuum that can kill spiders on request, said some machines might need an off button so it doesn’t wear out a human.

“Human sexuality has physical limits,” he said. “If the sex robot over-exerts its counterpart the counterpart will hardly have opportunity to have sex with human partners.

“It leads to questions of how a robot can process the data that it learns about desires. Should this be fed back to companies like Google or Amazon?”

While he agrees with the idea of robots in a therapeutic context, he said he “didn’t like” the idea of child-like versions — which is illegal in the UK — and said he would be “very, very careful” in future.

Dr Devlin said current versions are plagued by an “uncanny valley” issue in that: “the closer we make something look to reality, the creepier it is until it jumps that last gulf and becomes indistinguishable from a human.”

They’re also dominated by porn-industry stereotypes that are unappealing for many women.

“It’s not exploring the potential of virtual reality (VR). VR can move beyond this and it has the potential to get women involved. It doesn’t have to physically look human. There’s nothing that says a sex robot has to look human. That’s the pattern we’re stuck in,” she said.

“We’re at the infancy of sex robots technology in terms of what we can do. We don’t have to see it go down that path … We have all these questions, we don’t yet have the answers.”