A ROBOT that kisses you? There's only one way this is headed.

People of the Internet, it is time to retreat to your underground bunkers with a well oiled rifle and 3,000 cans of mushroom soup, because humanity has officially crossed the line. If it is any consolation, know that you are a part of history. This year will be known forever as the pivotal point at which we began our inexorable decline into anarchy. For 2008 brings the dawn of the kissing robot.

Dubbed Eternal Maiden Actualization (E.M.A.) this Sega Toys gadget will stand at a mere 38cm tall and sell for around £100 from September. It’s an evolutionary cousin of the Robosapien - a bumbling battery powered minibot for kids - and will be able to sing, dance and walk, using infrared sensors to stop it hurtling headlong into a table leg or a lawnmower. It will be cute. And funny. And entertaining. It will be petite and unassuming, but do not be fooled. This plastic trollop is nothing less than the vanguard of the apocalypse.

Why? Come closer. Cock your head and pout, then lean into the cold computerised face of the E.M.A. and be astounded as it swivels to return your affections with a kiss. It won’t be a satisfying kiss, coming as it does from a tiny helmeted robot with no lips, but the dangers of this diminutive digiwhore do not lie in the lacklustre delivery of its interspecies embrace. No. The problems lie ahead.

Because it’s not going to stop here. Once man finds there is money to be made in ploughing a new electronic furrow, his digging will not stop until he reaches Hell itself. Thus technological progression moves at a frightening rate, so where, for example, early calculators took up whole factories to house the horses their power supply required, today’s models are small enough to be implanted in our heads at birth, enabling us to perform simple mathematical tasks using thought alone.

20th century cash machines were little more than a man standing in the street with a sackful of notes and a keypad taped to his face, yet today we pay for our goods and services by emitting a simple sequence of coded bleeps with the microscopic modems we wear inside our mouths. And as recently as 1998, heavy square boxes known as “refrigerators” were utilised to keep food fresh for longer - now we simply store our milk in convenient wormholes connected to the sterile vacuum of outer space.

The pattern is clear. So while the kissing robot of 2008 may be small and stupid looking, tomorrow’s versions will be better. Soon they will be the size of people, their heads and bodies will be covered in realistic latex skin, their computational prowess and artificial intelligence will nudge ever closer to mimicking real human emotion and, crucially, they’ll have vaginas.

And that, people of the Internet, will be the end. Give a man a convincing wife with an off switch, and he’ll love her for a day. But give him the means to buy an endless supply of convincing wives with off switches and he will never leave his home again. Real interaction will die out. Reproduction will cease. By 2150, Earth will be nothing but wild animals, empty homes and 15 billion beautiful humanoid computers in dire need of a clean. The robots will have won. Thanks for nothing, Sega.

Trial units to the usual address please.