If robots are allowed to take all the physical and social effort out of life, lulling us with electronic flattery and 24/7 service, our humanity runs the risk of becoming redundant.

That is the message of Pixar's WALL-E, a mass-market children's film that is nonetheless a more subtle and insightful critique of these technological trends than the newest intellectual book of choice on the subject, David Levy's Love and Sex with Robots. Levy, an ardent techno-optimist, argues that by 2050 we will be marrying - and enjoying passionate sex with - robots that will possess "capacity for serving as our companions, our lovers, and our life partners ... in many ways ... superior to those of mere mortals". WALL-E offers a U-rated but much darker prospect: if we make robots our slaves and our intimates, there may come a time when the most human thing left on Earth will be a machine.

Pixar imagines that future as a pair of desolate cities. One, on the abandoned Earth, is Baudrillard's "desert of the real", an empty and decaying residuum, its only new skyscrapers the towers of compacted trash collected by WALL-E, the planet's last caretaker. The other city, floating in space, is the hyperreal world that our descendants have retreated into: a decadent playpen for oversized babies. Humankind's remnant cannot walk and have never been weaned, taking all their meals in liquid form. Driven in straight lines through endless automated routines, these will-less blobs, their vestigial skeletons buried under layers of fat, loll in robotic pushchairs, flattered by robotic beauticians and watch idly, dabbing at a touchpad, as the robots play tennis for them. It is the future as a hell built out of ceaseless indulgence, an error that Aristotle exposed two and a half millennia ago in Book Ten of his Nicomachean Ethics.