Sergi Santos samantha sex robot
Catalan nanotechnology engineer Sergi Santos sits beside Samantha, a sex doll packed with artificial intelligence providing her the capability to respond to different scenarios and verbal stimulus, in his house in Rubi, north of Barcelona, Spain, March 31, 2017. REUTERS/Albert Gea

Sex robots of the future will be able to cheat on their human partners and lie to get away with it, a researcher has claimed during an annual conference on the likelihood of future man and machine love. Rebejah Rousi, a cognative science researcher at the University of Jyvaskla, spoke at the Third International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots held in a private London location.

Though originally slated to take place at Goldsmith's University, the conference was moved after receiving international Islamist terror threats.

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Speaking via videolink, Rousi told the conference: "We have to consider if robots will have their own sexual desires and what will motivate these desires," the Daily Star reported. "If the end goal is to create autonomous robots that are capable of independent thinking and feeling, the chances of humans maintaining power within these relationships is quite marginal."

Research cited by Rousi showed robots designed to work cooperatively to discover a resource ending up lying to each other to gather more of the resource for themselves.

For those already in human and human relationships, the idea that their partner might pursue is a sexual relationship with a robot can be worrisome. According to a YouGov survey published in October, 32% of people think that intercourse with a robot is cheating, while 33% disagreed.

There was a slight divide between men and women, with 29% of men and 36% of women saying sex with a robot was cheating. Of those surveyed, only about 14% actually thought that sex with a robot counted as sexual intercourse while 33% thought it was more like masturbation.

Questions around the ethics and consequences of sex with robots have come to prominence recently as the public conversation has started to include an increasingly likely future where sex robots will be more widely available. A German survey published in October suggested that around a third of us would be open to sexual relations with a robot.

In the UK, around 40% of men said they would be open to the idea of a sexual encounter with a "hyper-realistic" doll – though only 19% of women agreed.