Women are hyped after waiting nearly a decade for 2025, the year when they are going to start having sex with robots rather than with men. At least, that’s according to a 2016 article by The Sun, which cited a futurologist and derived a sensationalist headline that inspired jokes for eight and a half years. Predictably, the meme surged in popularity as the calendar turned over to 2025.
“REVEALED: Women will be having more sex with ROBOTS than men by 2025,” the headline reads.
Women have been counting down and men have been pretending to dread the day for years, and it’s finally here—unlike the sex robots.
The Sun’s 2025 robot sex article
The meme started on June 30, 2016, when U.K. tabloid The Sun declared that advances in robotics would lead women to increasingly turn to pleasure bots for satisfaction, outpacing human males by this year. This was according to futurologist Dr. Ian Pearson, who predicted that people would warm up to AI to the point of wanting more than a friendship.
It seems he overestimated both the speed at which robot-technology would improve and humanity’s future affinity for AI.
“A lot of people will still have reservations about sex with robots at first but gradually as they get used to them, as the AI (artificial intelligence) and mechanical behaviour and their feel improves, and they start to become friends with strong emotional bonds, that squeamishness will gradually evaporate,” he said in his report.
This report, titled The Future of Sex Report: Rise of the Robosexuals, only exists today in the internet archives. Pearson partnered with U.K. adult retailer Bondara to create the report, which has been deleted from the company’s website.
Here come the 2025 robot sex jokes
Although The Sun was far from the only outlet to make headlines out of this kinky report, it was their post on X (then Twitter) that went viral as people joked and meme’d about robot sex. As the years ticked by, users would bring it up time and time again, especially around New Year’s.
In 2024, more people started counting down. Posts stating the months or weeks left before 2025 arrived often gained millions of views, no matter how simple they were.
On and just before Jan. 1, 2025, interest in the meme exploded as women celebrated and men mourned. It doesn’t matter that Pearson’s predictions failed to manifest, and few appeared to honestly think they would. The jokes may be all the funnier in a timeline that did not include 2025 robot sex for any gender.
Will we ever get sex robots?
Certain sectors of the tech industry have continued to promise that boinking bots are just around the corner. As of 2024, people were still working on prototypes, and anything resembling the kind of mechanical AI lover that science fiction promised us has yet to come into being.
“There are a handful of workshops trying to develop them and a couple of prototypes, like the Harmony robot made by the company Abyss Creations,” said sex robot expert Dr. Kate Devlin to Cosmopolitan in January 2024. “She’s available to pre-order, but she’s not actually being delivered to customers yet. That’s the closest people have really got.”
Harmony isn’t anything close to what’s pictured in that article by The Sun. In addition to being made for straight men, she’s little more than a robot head on a sex doll with an AI “personality” that you can only interact with through your phone.
However, something like AI girlfriends has appeared, if you consider advanced chat bots to be artificial intelligence. These may get men more accustomed to the idea of having relations with bots, as Pearson predicted, even if we’re still years away from a real sex robot. Unfortunately, some men are already verbally abusing these girlfriends.
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