By 2050 a robot may be your friend or lover

Romantic human-robot relationships are no longer just science fiction and researchers expect them to be a reality within four decades.

‘The scientists do not mean the mechanical sex but they are talking about loving relationships’ said  David Levy, the author of the book Love + Sex with robots at an International Conference at the University of Maastricht in the South-East of the country.

Robots will also have emotions, personality, consciousness and they can talk to you  and they can make you laugh. They can reciprocate love.

‘Robots as sex toys with electronic speech and sensors will be in the market within five years’, predicted Levy.

But to build robot as a real partner would take a bit longer with conversation skills being the main obstacles for developers.

Scientists are working on artificial personality, emotion and consciousness, said Levy and some robots already appear lifelike.

In 40 years hence or even sooner, we may have robots as conversation partners, that will talk to us and we will get as much pleasure from it as talking with another human being.

Levy’s bombshell thesis, whose publication has had a ripple-effect way beyond the scientific community gives rise to a number of complicated ethical and relationship questions.

British scholar Dylan Evans has pointed out the paradox inherent to any relationship with a robot. The crucial point is the sentiment of love, whose belief is neither unconditional nor eternal.

Evans said that robots could not choose or reject a person and they could be boring and even a human being could become cruel against a defenseless partner.

A robot could be programmed with a will of its own and a ability to reject his human partner but that would be a very difficult robot to sell.

However, some warn against being overhasty.

According to the Dutch researcher Vincent Wiegel of the Technological University of  the eastern town of  Delft that we should not exaggerate the possibilities and added that at present  the artificial intelligence we were able to create was that of a child of  one year of age.

But Levy was unyielding .He is convinced that it would happen  and also predicts many societal benefits.

He said that there were millions of peoples who had nobody. Those people might be ugly or might have personality problems or shy or they might have some psychological or psychosexual hang-ups.