Now maybe you're knowingly dating a robot, or perhaps you've had one constructed for that very purpose. But if you think your guy or gal might be an artificial intelligence, but you're not sure, look for these symptoms:

You've Only Spoken to Them Online

xkcd: It's always risky dating someone online. You don't know if that cute girl you've been chatting with is really an octogenarian with great taste in movies — or a particularly sophisticated spambot. Fortunately, this savvy Internet user knows a test for artificial intelligence far more efficient that the Turing Test or the Voight-Kampff.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer "I Robot...You Jane:" We all learn a valuable lesson about chatting with strange men when sweet, awkward Willow starts an online romance with Malcolm. She thinks she's found the man of her dreams — or at least someone to help her forget Xander for a while. Tragically, "Malcolm" is actually "Moloch," an ancient demon trapped in the school's computer system whose only means of physical interaction is through a robot body.

There Are Multiple Copies

Battlestar Galactica: Glowing spines would have been a handy way to tell the Cylons from the humans, but barring that, there are a few other ways to tell if the person you're sexing up is a Cylon. Baltar and Tyrol both date Cylon women with a penchant for sabotage, but Helo gets the most definitive clue to his lady friend's true nature, when he spots her exact duplicate hanging around Caprica with a Number Six.

Star Trek "Requiem for Methuselah:" Rayna Kapec seems like the perfect woman: intelligent, beautiful, and a great pool players. It's no wonder that Captain Kirk, who falls in lust every other week, pursues her. But, alas it's not meant to be. Kirk and Spock stumble into a chamber belonging to Rayna's guardian Flint, containing several earlier gynoid versions of the lovely Rayna. The emotional impact of learning that she's a robot and being forced to choose between Kirk and Flint prove too much for Rayna's circuits to handle, prompting an irrevocable meltdown.

The Twilight Zone "In His Image:" Jessica Connelly never actually learns that Alan Talbot, the man she fell in love with, is a robot. His creator and physical doppleganger, Walter Ryder, just quietly takes his place after Alan malfunctions and starts developing homicidal impulses.

They're Three Laws Compliant

Foundation: We'd all like our significant others to respect human life and to protect us when we're in danger. But Dors Venabili, Hari Seldon's bodyguard and eventual wife, is actually programed to do just that. Seldon does suspect that she's a robot, but by then he has already fallen for her.

Their Affection Can Kill

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me: British Intelligence never bothered to tell Austin Powers that his partner and new bride Vanessa Kensington is, in fact, a fembot planted by Dr. Evil. Austin learns soon enough when Vanessa points a pair of machine guns from her breasts, though she notes he would have figured it out sooner if he'd tried a little foreplay.

Kim Possible: So the Drama: When crime-fighting teenager Kim Possible needs a date to her junior prom, new student Eric appears just in the nick of time to be Kim's first steady boyfriend. She's understandably devastated when her nemesis Dr. Drakken kidnaps her new beau, and rushes to save him. But when Kim gives the newly liberated Eric a relieved hug, he electrocutes her, revealing himself to be one of Drakken's Synthodrones.

They Dance Like No Human Dances

"Der Sandmann" by ETA Hoffmann: Summer Glau's ballerina background may have been an excuse to place the Terminator Cameron in toe shoes, but gynoids have a long history of dancing. Olimpia, for example, is quiet adept at dance as well as singing and playing the harpsichord. Many find her cold and stiff movements a bit off-putting, but Nathanael, a young student already engaged to another woman, develops a passionate obsession with her. When he learns that Olimpia was an automaton all along, he's driven mad by the revelation, leaping to his death.

Metropolis: When the Joh Fredersen and Rotwang conspire to place a robot made to resemble the popular worker leader Maria upon the working caste, they hold a dance performance to see if the people of Metropolis see her as human. It works, and the men of Metropolis are immediately captivated. It's Fredersen's son Freder, who is in love with the real Maria, who eventually recognizes that she's not the girl he fell for, and must be a copy.

They've Returned from the Dead

Machine Teen: Carly Whitmere knows that her boyfriend, Adam Aaronson, is frequently ill, but never would she guess that his bouts of illness are the result of glitches in his robotic systems. It's actually not Carly, but Adam's best friend JT who first discovers his robotic nature, and later helps repair Adam after he is seemingly shot to death.

Star Trek "What Are Little Girls Made Of?:" Starfleet had lost contact with Nurse Christine Chapel's fiance Dr. Roger Korby for several years, so she was relieved to discover him apparently alive and well on Exo III. But it turns out the Korby she encounters is not quite the man she remembers, but an android copy that the dying Korby imbued with his appearance and memories, one who firmly believes in robot supremacy.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer "Ted:" When Joyce Summers starts dating Ted Buchanan, he seems to good to be true. He's charming, a fantastic cook, and happy to spend an afternoon playing miniature golf. Unfortunately, Ted also happens to be the robotic equivalent of Bluebeard, wooing women only to later hold them captive and watch them die. Although Buffy takes an instant dislike to this interloper, and accidentally "kills" him after Ted slaps her, Joyce only catches on to Ted's evil nature when Ted returns from the dead, all glitchy and malfunctioning.

It's inevitable, in general, that when we finally create self-aware machines, they'll want to destroy us — as soon as they realize humans are remaking Melrose Place, the robots will realize they have to remove us from the Earth for the good of the universe. But the robots we build to be our sexual playthings will be especially determined to slaughter us. "You want me to be the naughty bondage nurse again? Affirmative — as long as this time, I can tie you down and examine you from the inside out."

So here's our list of sex robots who turn lethal. Note: We're not listing killer robots who just happen to be sexy. To win a place on this list, a robot has to have been built for sex, and then turned lethal. Feel free to debate our choices below. As it is, it's perhaps not that surprising to realize that the sexbot who goes on a killing spree is a more common trope than you might expect at first.

Pris in Blade Runner.

She's really our poster girl — designed to be a "basic pleasure model," for use on the military colonies, she instead uses her amazing gymnastic, acrobatic and erotic skills to become the ultimate assassin. At one point, she almost decapitates Harrison Ford with her incredible thighs. (The Replicants are clearly artificial life forms, even if they do obviously have organic components. Feel free to debate whether Pris is a sexbot.)

April in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Uber-dweeb Warren Mears builds April to be the perfect girlfriend: she never cries or acts needy, but she cares about everything he cares about. And she's ultra sexy and eager to please. Too bad that when Warren gets sick of her and decides to toss her aside for a flesh-and-blood girlfriend, she becomes violently jealous and attacks Warren's new girlfriend, and anyone else who gets in her way. "If I can't [love Warren] what am I for?" she asks. The answer: slaughter! And mayhem!

Cynthia in Batman Beyond, "Terry's Friend Dates a Robot."

One of Terry McGinnis' fellow high schoolers, the nerdy Howard, programs a robot (in the shape of a beautiful woman, of course) to be his girlfriend because he's sick of being considered a loser. When he makes her personality "100% loyal", the robot interprets this in the most brutal form possible, attempting to kill any possible competition for Howard's attention.

The Sexoids in Ghost In The Shell.

It seems kind of obvious to me: If you don't want your sexbots to rise up and murder you, don't call them "Sexoids." It just doesn't sound like a very sexy name — or cool, for that matter. The Sexoids pretty much turn to murder every time they pop up in Ghost In The Shell, but especially in GITS: Innocence, it's all about the Sexoids murdering their owners.

The Stepford Wives.

This is sort of a different case: They don't turn on their owners. Instead, these women designed entirely for pleasure start their jobs off by killing the flesh-and-blood woman they're replacing, at least in the original movie version. (In the book, I think the husbands kill the original wives.)

The sexbots in whatever movie this is:

Some guy on Metafilter remembers seeing a classic 1970s movie about "Crazy SexBot Women Who Kill." With buzzsaws coming out of their breasts, even:

Sometime in the late 70s or early 80s I remember seeing a movie on local TV that I did not understand (I was a somewhat-sheltered little kid in those days). All I remember is that there were women in the movie who were robots or androids of some sort (perfect human replicas a la Blade Runner), who killed at least a couple of men via sex. I remember one scene pretty clearly in which one of these women had her breasts sort of start spinning like small buzzsaws out of her clothes, killing whatever guy was with her. Another scene I really vividly remember had one of these fembots straddling a man (on the floor, I think, with both of them mostly clothed). The man was enjoying himself at first, "Oooooohhhh, ahhhhh," and then he started to scream and shriek. At the time I had no idea what was going on, but later on when I learned about the birds and the bees I realized that the bot-woman must have killed him with her vagina (something buzz-saw-y like the other chick's breasts).

What movie is this guy remembering? Or did he just smoke too much LSD back in the day?

Sylvie in Bubble Gum Crisis 5: Moonlight Rambler.

Someone is murdering vampires in MegaTokyo, and it turns out to be a pleasure droid named Sylvie, who's harvesting vampire blood because her fellow sexdroid Anri was injured escaping from a space station. Sylvie needs the vampire blood to repair Anri and help her remain fully functional. "Without it, she'll be forced to hurt people, like me," Sylvie explains. Why did you do it? asks Priss. "I wanted to be free... like you," says Sylvie. (At about 6:55 in the video at left.)

The Lucy Liu Bots in Futurama.

The Charlie's Angels star is just one of the celebrities illegally held by Nappster. Then the corporation placed Liu's personality into a blank robot so Fry could date her. When his friends exposed Nappster's scheme, they unleash a murderous wave of Lucy Liu Bots to kill all the witnesses.

Maria in Metropolis.

Okay, to be fair, her purpose was always fairly deadly. But she starts out being a bit of a pleasure droid before she gets down to some serious evil — in her early scenes, she does a weird, hyper-sexual dance for a bunch of leering aristocrats.

Freya in Saturn's Children by Charles Stross.

Poor Freya — she's designed to be sexually attracted to humans, but we're extinct. What's a sex robot to do? She takes part in an illegal smuggling operation, smuggling "pink goo," or organic cells — and of course, she has to do some killing along the way. Because that's the smuggler's life.

Verlis in Metallic Love by Tanith Lee.

Lee's 2005 sequel to her classic Silver Metal Lover brings back Silver, the former "pleasure robot," now renamed Verlis. He starts a new love affair, with a young girl named Loren. He's designed to be the ultimate companion, charming and talented — but he and his seven fellow robots also have deadly gifts, like creating weapons out of their bodies and turning themseves into giant dragons. As SciFiWeek puts it, "Constructed as beautiful playthings, they are instead deadly powerful creatures who regard humans as lesser life forms and a threat to their existence." And they have plans to throw off their corporate shackles and achieve "world domination."

Silver in Tomb Raider: The Man Of Bronze.

According to this third Tomb Raider novel, Silver is "a pleasure bot," programmed to seduce women. But over the centuries, he's gotten warped and is now determined to wipe out his rival Bronze, no matter whom he has to kill along the way. What does this have to do with raiding tombs? Don't ask me.

The Sexbots in Buttobi CPU.

In this Japanese porn anime series, a man meets a sexbot who becomes very attached to him. But then, for some reason I've never been clear on, another sexbot shows up and starts trying to kill him — maybe out of jealousy. In any case, this being a hentai video, he has to give "his" sexbot a powerup to fight the other sexbot, by inserting his genetic material into her rear data port. Yatta!

Aphrodite IX.

She's a sexbot who's reprogrammed as an amnesiac assassin, and she's the star of her own Top Cow comics series. Soon to be a major motion picture, apparently.

The Fembots in Austin Powers.

Okay, so they're pretty much programmed to kill. But they also seem to be programmed to please, at a fairly basic level. Consider Miss Kensington (Elizabeth Hurley), who spends the first movie slowly getting romantic with Austin Powers, before being revealed as a murderous fembot in the first couple of minutes of the sequel.

Amazing Blade Runner-inspired photos by Dani*Dune (More at the link.)

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

Sources told Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke that Austin Powers 4 will be a tribute to Myers' own father. "It's very personal with a father and son theme loosely based on his own life." Somehow this translates into a movie about supervillain Dr. Evil and his son Scott, played by Seth Green. Myers is cowriting it with Baby Mama's Mike McCullers, who also cowrote the second and third Austins.

I loved the first Powers and found the second a dull retread, and I didn't even bother to watch the third. I do remember some fun sequences where the Evils go on a talk show together, and Seth Green is always fun to watch. And maybe the only way to make a fourth Austin Powers movie interesting would be to have Austin himself be a minor character in the film. But still... I'm not convinced there's any good reason for a fourth outing, other than Mike Myers' career troubles. [Deadline Hollywood Daily]

1. People should dress like grown-ups. That means no pajamas. No shiny gold or silver fabrics. No GWAR gear. No matter what era you're writing about, professional people will wear clothes that allow everyone else to take them seriously. And space travelers will probably wear outfits that are functional and help keep them alive.

2. No jolly lectures. This is more of a book thing. When a character stands around for three pages explaining the author's philosophies in a cheery tone, it's the prose version of a giant glittery tiara. I'm looking at you, Robert Anson Heinlein.

3. Take off that shiny apron, robot! The robots of the future will be stronger, smarter and more durable than anything we have today — they'll basically be able to sever your spine with a flick of one of their little microfilaments. So it's understandable and desirable for robots to be cute or sexy to distract us from their genocidal potential. But "cute" doesn't have to include a silly cartoon voice, a catch-phrase like "beady beady" or a funny walk.

4. Rock music cannot possibly get sillier. There are limits to what even the brain-damaged tweens of the 22nd century will bop around to — and there's no way it could be dumber than Debbie Gibson or Aaron Carter. Barring radical brain mutations, future pop music will at least be sorta catchy and have a few okay lyrics. The worst is when a novel or comic book reproduces song lyrics of the future — and they're the author's bad poetry. Somehow, these things are always worse on the page.

5. Neologisms should be plausible. In other words, if you have a future technology, and you're coming up with a name or slang term for it, it should be something you could imagine grown-ups saying. Comedy shows us what not to do in serious SF, with the zany slang in Woody Allen's Sleeper: "It's not only cool, it's Koogat!"

6. Yay sex, but boo zany ironic dominatrixes. That's pretty much all I had to say about that.

7. Cut down on the eyeliner, Mr. Spock! Yes, it matches your blue top. But just listen to Yahoo Answers: light-blue eyeshadow looks "tacky and outdated."

8. In general, aliens should be alien, not human ethnic groups or stereotypes. This pertains to campiness because the number one cause of campy aliens is a failure to imagine a truly non-human lifeform. Instead of the shock of an organism whose life cycle and culture are totally at odds with ours, we get the wacky Jamaicans in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

9. And no more cultures with just one wise saying. If an alien race has managed to make it into interstellar space and develop artificial gravity, it might also be advanced enough to afford two great philosophers or schools of thought. Worst of all are the Ferengi on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, who quote the Rules of Acquisition as if they're the only book Ferenginar has ever produced.

10. If you must have villains, make them awesome. Mike Meyers did us a favor creating Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies — by giving us a template for what villains should not be like outside of comedies. Villains can be scary, or understated, or believable people whose agendas are at odds with the hero's... but they shouldn't kill us with cuteness.

11. If you must tackle religion, avoid being woo-woo. That means no priests with funny outfits. Yes, priests dress funny in real life, but they're still campy on screen. That also means no prophecies, especially ones with funny names. Visions are okay, if they're more David Lynch and less Derek Jarman.

12. Musicals are inherently campy. Do you ever find yourself watching the Buffy musical episode, or Rocky Horror, and thinking, "Gee, I wish there was more stuff like this in my science fiction?" If so, then maybe you should spend some time in fantasy-land instead. People bursting into song and doing that thing with their hands is directly opposed to the willing suspension of disbelief thing.

13. Punk is campy. Maybe it wasn't in the 1960s, or whenever you guys invented it, but it is now. Sorry. That goes for regular punk (just watch Doomsday) as well as cyberpunk (watch the Matrix sequels) and definitely steampunk. Steampunk is camp-tastic.

14. Time-travel leads to culture shock, not Culture Club. Journeying to another era shouldn't be an excuse for Renfaire/Society for Creative Anachronism goofiness. I've seen enough pithy Victorians (especially on Doctor Who) and doughty Medievals to last me a thousand time warps. And our ancestors may have been less technologically advanced, but they weren't freaking morons. (Well, okay, some of them were.)

15. Robots shouldn't pee. They shouldn't pee on people. They shouldn't pee in space. They shouldn't "vent coolant" in the middle of a hot robo-fisting scene. Robotic urine just should not be part of our lexicon at all.

16. A certain amount of cheesiness may be inevitable in science fiction. Just accept it. The difference between cheesiness and camp is that camp is self-aware and deliberate, and cheesiness is a result of someone fervently saying, "We're going to have giant robots fighting for ten minutes and it's going to be stupendous! Yeah!!"

17. Don't go retro. Sky Captain and the World Of Tomorrow winks so hard at classic scifi it's got a permanent squint. The 1930s fin-headed scifi was the original reference point for much of the seminal works of camp, and earns a starring role in Susan Sontag's foundational 1964 essay on camp. So looking backwards will only make you look ironic and funnily subversive.

18. Absolutely no go-go boots or sparkles. And no epaulets. Or shoulderpads. Or giant buckles, or insignias that are bigger than someone's hand.

19. No more Angelina Jolie. She's cute, but she camps up every role she's in. Just look at Tomb Raider. And the aforementioned Sky Captain. She's the main reason why this summer's Wanted will be a huge camp-fest.

20. War is hell, but shouty-jumpy soldiers belong in Monty Python. Yes, we get it — you're subverting the deadly conformity of military protocol by having your soldiers act like loons. But a little bit of armed-forces wackiness and slogan-shouting goes a long way. And that goes double for Starship Troopers' fake war propaganda.

21. Don't confuse "campiness" with "fun." You can create a fun, exciting storyline without going the campiness route. Space battles can be adrenaline-blasting, without any need for funny computer voices or zany puppet aliens. We like to watch people kickbox on the the deck of a satellite that's breaking up as much as anybody. Just, you know, without the shiny pajamas. Movie screencaps taken from Wetcircuit.

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• The Guardian from Star Trek: In "City on the Edge of Forever," Kirk and Spock had to hop through a giant talking stone donut in order to follow a crazy Bones back into the Great Depression. Bones had a fever and a bad skin rash, Spock had to work in a soup kitchen and build a device in what little spare time he had, while Kirk spent all his time wooing Joan Collins. Later, they were able to hop safely back through. If that's not easy time travel, then I don't know what is.
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• The Omni from Voyagers!: Voyagers! ran on NBC from 1982 to 1983, and featured the awesome pocket-watch sized Omni as one of the coolest time travel devices ever. It had a miniature scale model of the earth inside, and red and green lights that would tell you if time was "flowing normally" or if it had been disturbed. You would spin the dials and set it (and forget it) and travel back to any time you wanted, which usually just happened to involve temporal anomalies involving famous people.
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• The Flash's Cosmic Treadmill: Barry Allen decided he wanted to check out time travel, so he invented a treadmill that ran (zing!) on cosmic rays. A speedster could set it to a specific time, either forwards or backwards, and then run on the treadmill until it sent him back to that time. Get this, they stayed in that time by "maintaining his internal vibration" that was specific to that time travel. Talk about working overtime. Later Wally West discovered he could time travel without the treadmill, but nothing really beats putting the word "cosmic" in front of something. If only he'd invented the cosmic ab-cruncher and cosmic stairmaster.
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• Dr. Evil's Time Warp Machine from Austin Powers 2: This is from the category of time machine where they never even attempt to explain to you why or how it works, it just does. Which is how all evil genius machines should work. Who needs all that explanation about tachyons and the space-time continuum and all that? Plus it had a psychedelic look and feel to it as well. You just run up to it and throw yourself on it like a velcro wall, and you pop out in the appropriate time... as long as they have another time machine on the other end, apparently. Granted, Austin's own new Volkswagen bug time machine might have looked cool, but that was just a Delorean ripoff.
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• Doctor Doom's Time Platform: Not to be outdone by all the time travel going on in the DC universe, where it seemed like if Superman sneezed he'd end up in the 1800s, Marvel had their own action happening with Doom and his time machine. Doom never really got enough credit, building working Doombots, devices that gave people superpowers, creating massive weapons and all that jazz. Maybe because he was too whiny and bitchy when it came to the Fantastic Four. Anyhow, his time machine was a platform that you'd stand on, wank with some controls, and then you'd be sent back in time, no problem! Why he never conquered the damn world with this thing I'll never know.
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• The Time Traveling Roller Coaster Ride from Timecop: In this Jean Claude Van Damme flick, you hopped into what looked like an amusement park ride, and got blasted towards a wall that you hoped would open up into a time-portal before you got smushed into jelly. It uses the whole "acceleration as time travel" idea, but really does it in style. We just wish there would have a been a "You Must Be This HIgh To Ride This Ride" sign next to Van Damme. Or at least someone asking for his e-ticket.
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• The Timespheres from Terminator: They weren't the most practical devices, because when you were sent back through them they burned off all your clothes. Meaning you couldn't be sent backwards or forwards into a heavily populated area unless you didn't mind everyone seeing your junk. Now, don't ask us how they can send machines back in time as long as they're covered with skin. It boggles our mind too.
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• The penny from Somewhere in Time: Christopher Reeve learned how to travel back in time from 1980 to 1912 in order to be with Jane Seymour, who he's fallen in love with from staring at old photographs of her. Yes, it's corny, we know it. But when he finds a Lincoln penny from 1979 in his pocket and zaps back to the future, even you might admit you have feelings, you robots. It was based on the novel Bid Time Return by I Am Legend author Richard Matheson, and is Reeve's best-known film outside of the Superman series.
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• Uncle Rico's Time Machine from Napoleon Dynamite: Sure, it didn't work and it appeared to only make your testicles hurt (no idea what it did to women), but you had to give the ripoff artist who invented it credit for including things like "time crystals." We'd still want one, just to screw with people.
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