I assumed wrong. "It's a little scary," Alexa confessed as we talked on the phone and I squinted at a live picture of her on a tiny, fuzzy box on my screen. I'm pretty sure she's pretty and possibly blond. "It looks like it might hurt me. And it's making these ramming noises. Like a jackhammer." I had never prided myself on being a gentle and considerate lover; "ramming noises" and "like a jackhammer," however, were not phrases I was used to hearing.

Alexa, ever the playful one, told me she'd take off her top if I could make her light box change colors, so I got one of the tech guys at work to help me. Soon I could see her yawning on my monitor. This, I thought, was getting to be more like the sexual experiences I was accustomed to.

After 20 minutes, I think I got the color to change and the scary jackhammer noise to increase. "I get turned on by anything sexual," Alexa purred as she took off her top and jeans. "But not this."

We talked some more, and she told me she'd named herself after Billy Joel's daughter, which I thought was in bad taste. Then I realized, looking down at the giant latex pudendum jumping around my desk, that I wasn't in a position to comment on matters of taste.

Still, in the name of science I concentrated on the image of Alexa on the screen and tried to act sexy. "You are driving me crazy," I told her.

"Really?" she responded.

"No."

"Damn."

This was the high point of our encounter — that and when I admitted I was incapable of having phone sex. "Having good phone sex is just saying how you feel," she told me.

"I feel silly," I confessed.

"Not like that."

Eventually we decided to stop. "It has nothing to do with you," she said as she pulled her jeans over her hips. "We're just asking each other technical questions, and it takes away the sexiness." Virtual sex was indeed eerily like real sex for me.

Even if the technology vastly improves and if Alexa and I can one day consummate our awkward phone conversation, I don't think teledildonics is the next generation of pornography. Perhaps it might replace 900 numbers, with men paying to control the toys of women they can see on their screens, but that's about it. Most people will still want to enjoy their sexual fantasies alone, because even a programmable robot is going to be just an annoying, unsuccessful intermediary — not to mention a very difficult thing to hide in an underwear drawer.

And as far as real sex goes, no high-tech device can ever replace a living, breathing person. Because even if a machine felt real and looked real, it could never reproduce the real thrill of sex: knowing that another being is freely giving herself to you and that at least for a few minutes, you're not alone.

Now, why couldn't I come up with something like that when I had Alexa on the phone?