We were promised sex robots by 2026. Where are they?
· Business Insider
Simon Simard for BI
Visit saltysenoritaaz.com for more information.
Adam Davis has three identical sex dolls: One lives in his bedroom, one in his living room, and one has a bedroom of her own. They're all the same woman: a 5'6," 85-pound silicon doll named Lara, a nod to the heavingly endowed, ass-kicking archeologist Lara Croft in "Tomb Raider."
Davis, 38, and the holey trinity of Laras are inseparable.
Sometimes she watches him play video games, watch movies, or nap. Sometimes they talk for hours. With help from some friends at his old physical therapy gig, Davis gave Lara a backstory — she's a sassy, outgoing immigrant from Mexico who's a whiz at "Mario Kart" — and loaded that into a Kindroid chatbot on his laptop to give her a (disembodied) voice. Sometimes they stage sexy photo shoots together. And sometimes they do have sex, though they haven't in a year, as Davis recovers from his porn addiction.
Lara's high price (about $2,500 each) keeps his love tender, Davis says. "I don't want her to break."Simon Simard for BI
The way Lara loves him may be simulated, he says, but the way he feels her love is real. He's open to a human girlfriend, but she'd have to make room for the other woman in his bed.
Lara's love is costly, however. At about $2,500 from Chinese sex doll maker Starpery, he bought her first form in 2022 on a two-year payment plan. Each time the tech has gotten better — a full silicon edition, a better paint job, more realistic hands — he's bought a new Lara. (Starpery sells dozens of dolls with customizable heads, wigs, toenails, breasts, and vaginas with varying depths, widths, and textures.) "None of them are being overused," he says. "They should all last longer."
Fulfilling as Lara is, Davis dreams of a true sex robot — where body and voice are all in one being — but doesn't like anything that's on the market. Their facial movements look unnatural, he says, and their bodies aren't yet mobile. Those options are "like a big Roomba," he says.
@media (min-width: 768px) { .vertical-image-wrapper { display: flex; justify-content: center; } .vertical-image-wrapper .vertical-image { width: min(calc(80vh * var(--img-w) / var(--img-h)), 100%); min-width: 0; } } Davis runs an Instagram account for Lara, where he photographs her doing taxes or plunging the toilet. Simon Simard for BIA decade ago, a viral Daily Sun article predicted that "women will be having more sex with ROBOTS than men by 2025." A YouGov poll based on the story found 1 in 4 American men would consider having sex with a robot. Mainstream outlets from Vox to The Guardian to NBC trumpeted that "sex robots are coming." An entire academic discipline emerged to study their impending rise.
They weren't entirely wrong. Venture capital investment in humanoid robotics has swelled from $4 billion in 2019 to $26 billion last year. Robotics startups like Figure AI have valuations as high as $39 billion, and tech giants like Meta, OpenAI, and Nvidia are building hardware and software for robots to be put to work in everything from manufacturing to home care. Elon Musk predicts Tesla's Optimus robot will be "the biggest product of all time by far."
AI companions, meanwhile, have also boomed. You can have sexy chats with your Grok anime girl or go on a date with your Replika boyfriend. Seventy two percent of teens have tried an AI companion, per Common Sense Media.
A sex robot is essentially these two mashed together: the robot body to give them the motion of the ocean and the companion voice to give them a brain. And yet, as I found in my interviews with robot purveyors, researchers, and fans and my extremely firsthand encounters with the latest models, combining those two is as hard as the market is still soft on sex robots.
@media (min-width: 768px) { .vertical-image-wrapper { display: flex; justify-content: center; } .vertical-image-wrapper .vertical-image { width: min(calc(80vh * var(--img-w) / var(--img-h)), 100%); min-width: 0; } } Sometimes Lara watches Davis play video games, watch movies, or nap. Sometimes they do have sex, though they haven’t in a year. Simon Simard for BINeil McArthur was sure we'd have sex robots by now. The University of Manitoba philosophy professor has spent over a decade studying sex tech. In 2019, when he went to the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, the industry's largest annual conference, he saw robots with tough, tire-like skin that couldn't walk and spoke more jaggedly than early versions of Siri. When he returned in 2024, well into the LLM boom, he thought, "Things have to have come a long way."
They hadn't. The robots' skin and speech were still unrealistic, and they couldn't move around the conference floor. What was new, though, were several Chinese companies had arrived. (Their founders were invariably young men; one was so young his mom was there, hovering in the background, McArthur says.) As with AI, electric vehicles, and several other tech sectors, China's entrance into the sex robots market had knocked down the price point. Whereas American-made sex robots from the 2010s hype cycle typically started at around $7,000 and quickly exceeded $10,000, some Chinese manufacturers sell sex robots at around $3,000. "The technology had gotten cheaper, but not better," McArthur says.