Human prostitutes could be a thing of the past by 2050, as more and more robots get pimped into prostitution.
That's the future envisioned by Michelle Mars and Ian Yeoman at Victoria University of Wellington, who have released a report suggesting that lifelike robots will be coming to a brothel near you.
Mars and Yeoman see lots of advantages to having "hoe-bots" doing the dirty work instead of humans, such as "commercial sex robots would be free of disease and would reduce the trafficking of real people," they told The Week.
Despite the fact that these hard-wired whores will suck up electricity as opposed to, er, never mind, the raunchy robot researchers say the idea isn't that shocking.
“Sex robots are absolutely inevitable. In fact, they already exist,” Mars told Business Insider. “Society has had relationships with machines and we continue to have increasingly intimate relationships with more and more sophisticated technologies."
For instance, there is "Roxxxy," an interactive doll costing between $7,000 to $9,000 that was unveiled at an adult entertainment expo in 2010, and, according to MSNBC.com, can be programmed with different personalities such as frigid Farrah and wild Wendy.
If you're the type of person who can't get used to the idea of getting kinky with an android, don't worry: There will still be human sex workers as well.
“Human prostitution will still be around. It’s the oldest profession and won’t be thwarted by robot alternatives,” Mars told MSNBC.com. “It’s just that high-quality alternatives where the robots are indistinguishable from humans will cut down the profitability of human exploitation.”
However, some tech writers such as Lauren Davis believes there are some questions that need to be answered before "ho-bots" become as common as smartphones.
"Would sex robots ... diminish the demand for human sex tourism enough to negatively impact the economies of certain regions? Or would human sex tourism in those regions explode as robotic prostitutes came to displace human ones in places that could afford the robots?" she wrote on iOP.com. "If human sex tourism did somehow become an economic impossibility, how might the economies of those regions shift and change?"
Christian Bryant of Mashable.com also sees some potential downsides, such as weird R2D2 noises during sex and waiting for software updates and one definite upside.
"Technically, this won't be cheating, right?" he asked.