It seems like every month or so, some news outlet reports that "Sex Robots Will End Humanity" -- since people like fucking robots so much, they'll stop having real sex, and then babies won't be born, and then there'll be no more humans around to build sex robots in the first place, which means something like superintelligent raccoons will take over and that will be it for the human race.

One common facet of this is that it's talking about men...men are buying the sex dolls, men are getting "virtual girlfriends", men are going to stop conceiving babies. The ass-backwards thing here is that nobody's talking about women; there have been a few articles about sex dolls designed for women, but they don't frequently go into using it as a replacement for male companionship.

And companionship is always mentioned in the articles, but never really reflected on: the one in the first link basically says that Japan has seen an increase in sex doll purchases as reported loneliness is increasing.

And that's the key to things: men aren't choosing to fuck toys instead of women; they're fucking dolls because they don't have the opportunity to fuck a woman as often as they want. If they find a willing flesh-and-blood partner, they'll be glad to make babies. The guys that explicitly prefer dolls to women, who are most frequently paraded out by 'weird news' interviewers, let Darwin have them. But nobody's acknowledging that if a woman wants to get fucked by a guy they want to fuck, robots aren't preventing that from happening. At least not yet. Terminator-style robots may want to prevent humans from reproducing someday down the road, under orders from the superintelligent raccoons, but for now sexrobots are funtimes for lonely people, not causing a population crisis.