THE ROBOTS ARE coming. In fact, they’ve been here for the best part of a decade, assembling cars, doing the heavy lifting in warehouses and assisting with medical procedures. They’re detonating bombs, stocking shelves and delivering meals.

Anatomically correct sex doll robots are providing a ‘full range of sexual services’ for incels with around $195,000 (€171,000) to spend on a companion that can also be programmed to laugh at their jokes and remember every tedious detail about their owner’s job dissatisfaction, family feuds and favourite foods.

HANGZHOU, CHINA - AUGUST 17, 2024 - An intelligent bionic beauty robot performs and interacts with citizens to answer questions at a shopping mall in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China, Aug 17, 2024. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Tech overlords like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos have variously predicted scenarios within the next decade where almost every unskilled or semi-skilled job, and a significant number of highly skilled professions, will be performed by robots.

Amazon plans to replace 600,000 human workers with robots within the next seven years. And Bezos has invested $100 billion (€87.87 billion) in an industrial automation initiative which will replace factory workers with robots on a global scale.

Robot teachers, and Project Sally

In the United States, where public schools are struggling with a chronic shortage of qualified teachers and a crippling dearth of support staff, school districts are increasingly looking at ways that AI and robots can bridge the gap.

The White House is all on board, with Melania Trump leading the charge to introduce AI and humanoid robots into education, with the caveat that they should ‘empower rather than replace’ teachers. Critics of her endorsement are sceptical both of the degree of understanding she possesses about the potential scope and consequences of using robots to educate children.

Melania is pushing for robots in the classroom. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Last March, when she arrived to chair a White House technology summit accompanied by a life-sized robot, there were predictable gags about the difficulty in figuring out which was the First Lady and which was the humanoid machine.

Aside from presiding over a........

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