9 percent would have sex with a robot

The good thing is that we're a dying species.

This allows us to have a more rounded perspective on life, the world, and every little thing that's coming to replace us.

We know that we are generally incapable of making the right decisions at the right time. So we invented humor to take the edge off it.

We also know that we're increasingly incapable of efficiency and, well, work in general. So we invented robots. Now, we have to decide what we're going to do with them before they do away with us.

In a survey conducted -- with, presumably, entirely straight faces -- by the Huffington Post and YouGov, real human beings offered their more profound thoughts on the robotic future.

You might believe that people still need convincing to let robots into their homes.

However, a very significant 33 percent said they wouldn't mind having a robot servant. I am not sure if this was correlated with those who were deeply committed to "Downton Abbey."

Twenty-two percent said that if they had an aging friend or relative, of course it would be fine if a robot looked after their every need.

What other uses could people foresee for their mechanical brethren? Driving cars? Most certainly (46 percent). Fighting wars? Oh, bring them on. We're tired of all this fighting overseas with so little point (48 percent).

I have, of course, been saving the most important for the very end. One should always to do that with intimacy.

With a complete lack of prudishness, the surveyors asked whether it would be au fait to have sex in a robot way.

Nine percent said that yes, sure, fine, OK, why not, they would have sex with a robot.

The flaccid of mind will, no doubt, offer that 9 percent of people in a survey would say anything.

I prefer to look upon this result in a far more hopeful way. If as many as almost 1 in 10 people are prepared to have sex with a robot, it means that they can foresee a time when there will be some mutual understanding. Empathy, even.

Currently, it feels as if engineers are stuffing robots down the throats of troubled humans, explaining to them in patronizing tones that this is, this must be, the future.

And yet we live in a world where the favorite word of both the left- and right-brained is "hybrid."

Though many (42 percent) are still confused as to whether sex with a robot would constitute infidelity, I believe it might constitute the ultimate hybrid hope.

I am sure that clever left-brained people will find a way for robots to inseminate and be inseminated. If they can drive cars and fly you to the moon, surely they'll find a way to make little robots.

But the product of a human-robot union might be a rather interesting character. This child, when grown, would offer a little human perspective on the more maniacal robot ideas such as, well, Google Glass.

It might instinctively insert the concept of privacy into new, supposedly social inventions.

It might, indeed, think more naturally about the human implications of every form of technological "progress," long before humans are asked to change their behavior because that's what the technology demands.

Sex between robots and humans? This could save the world as we'd like to know it.