Sexbot Unpacker: I Dive into the Near Future's Tech and Ethics

Being and Value in Technology

A number of companies have started to developed humanoid robots that (1) bear some physical resemblance to human beings, (2) have some ability to initiate movements (e.g. blinking; head-turning, gyration, etc.) and (3) possess some AI functionalities enabling quasi-intelligent environment-responsiveness and linguistic expression. The robots I am speaking of are sex robots. A promise frequently voiced by sex-robot developers (and some academics) is that sex robots will be “good companions” who can enrich and transform the romantic lives of human persons, particularly those who – for various reasons – have trouble entering into traditional love relationships with other humans. Curbing this technological enthusiasm, many philosophers have offered more critical anticipations of sex robots (sex-robot-anticipation hereafter) and the idea that they can, will, or should become good companions to human users. While these critical sex-robot-anticipations alert us to some of the potential harms that may follow from a proliferation of sex robots into society, the overarching aim of this chapter is to show that, by and large, these anticipations fall short. Specifically, they continue to frame the anticipation of sex robots around the question of their potential as good companions. In doing so, I argue that many sex-robot-anticipations at best marginalise key ethical questions pertaining to our potential future with sex robots. At their worst, these sex-robot-anticipations are inadvertently contributing to the potential realisation of a technology that they are precisely worried about. In the process of critically engaging with much of today’s philosophical sex-robot-anticipation, I will introduce two criteria I take to be of central importance for good sex-robot-anticipation; what I call ‘reflective anticipation’ and ‘technological groundedness.’

Governing the Future: Digitalization, Artificial Intelligence, Dataism, ed. Henning Glaser, Pindar Wong, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, forthcoming 2023.

This paper explores a line of concern underrepresented in the emerging debate about sex robots, arguing for caution in their development. Today's sex robots cannot suffer because they lack sentience. However, future sex robots that may be sentient could suffer harm due to precedents set today regarding behaviors toward their non-sentient predecessors. The challenge emerges from our lack of philosophically uncontested criteria for sentience in a robot. This paper discusses the phenomenon of spillover, described by Robert Nozick as a situation in which members of one moral category are treated in ways appropriate to another. In the case of sex robots, spillover occurs when robots that could be sentient are treated in ways appropriate to robots that are certainly not sentient. Sex robots could cause harmful spillover.

M/C Journal, 2019

2018

The prevalence of discussions regarding sex robots shows a growing anxiety around human-robot interactions (HRI) (Scheutz & Arnold, 2016). The growing field of ‘Lovotics’ seeks to explore the romantic potential of harmonizing love, sex and robotics with HRI (Levy, Cheok & Devlin, 2016). Feminists exploring technology’s potential as a tool to establish gender equality also recognise the problematic nature of the globalized and capitalist market’s potential to impede progress, as explored in Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto and Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman (1991) (2013). As technology advances, Realbotix aim to pioneers in the sex-robot field, attempting to create “The Perfect Companion”. Firstly with “Harmony AI”, “part android app, part sexualised robotic assistant” and then also “Harmony Sex Robot” powered by the AI application in a humanoid body. These latest creations introduced to the market are posited as products to have an intimate relationship with (Realbotix, 2018). Our perception of intimacy has changed through technological mediation, as we become increasingly involved in online social interactions (Shank, 2014) (Turkle, 2013), but also because of market-driven changes, an aspect also reflected in globalized sexual commerce (Bernstein, 2008). This investigation seeks to explore how intimacy and companionship is sold through technologically mediated sexual commerce. Through a dualistic approach of discourse analysis of the Realbotix website and cyberethnography of potential customer’s forum comments, this project creates an early approach towards the commercialisation of intimacy mediated through a technologically and artificially created female. This will lead to a reflection on technology and sexual commerce’s mutations that accommodate this desire for intimacy, and how this is characterised through sex robots.

Techne, 2019

Drawing on insights from robotics, psychology, and human-computer interaction, developers of sex robots are currently aiming to create emotional bonds of attachment and even love between human users and their products. This is done by creating robots that can exhibit a range of facial expressions, that are made with human-like artificial skin, and that possess a rich vocabulary with many conversational possibilities. In light of the human tendency to anthropomorphize artefacts, we can expect that designers will have some success and that this will lead to the attribution of mental states to the robot that the robot does not actually have, as well as the inducement of significant emotional responses in the user. This raises the question of whether it might be ethically problematic to try to develop robots that appear to love their users. We discuss three possible ethical concerns about this aim: first, that designers may be taking advantage of users' emotional vulnerability; second, that users may be deceived; and, third, that relationships with robots may block off the possibility of more meaningful relationships with other humans. We argue that developers should attend to the ethical constraints suggested by these concerns in their development of increasingly humanoid sex robots. We discuss two different ways in which they might do so.