Akin to the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots (here and here) comes a Campaign Against Sex Robots:
Over the last decades, an increasing effort from both academia and industry has gone into the development of sex robots – that is, machines in the form of women or children for use as sex objects, substitutes for human partners or prostitutes. …
- We believe the development of sex robots further objectifies women and children.
- The vision for sex robots is underscored by reference to prostitute-john exchange which relies on recognizing only the needs and wants of the buyers of sex, the sellers of sex are not attributed subjectivity and reduced to a thing (just like the robot).
- The development of sex robots and the ideas to support their production show the immense horrors still present in the world of prostitution which is built on the “perceived” inferiority of women and children and therefore justifies their uses as sex objects.
- We propose that the development of sex robots will further reduce human empathy that can only be developed by an experience of mutual relationship.
Jeremy Hsu on Lovesick Cyborg blog at Discover.com comments:
But the call for a blanket ban on the development of sex robots raises several questions. First, it’s unclear why robotic technology should be singled out for a ban when many other existing technologies already contribute to the reinforcement of gender inequality in society. The same argument about technology leading to objectification and reinforcement of gender inequality could be made for pornography, dating apps or online services, and sex or romance simulation games.
I suspect the answer is that this particular technological application is still in its infancy, at best; the campaign should like to strangle it in its crib, if I may say it. The others are out and about and thus difficult to stifle.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown @ Reason.com has worked this territory before. Since Reason is libertarian, it’s no surprise she’s cheering the industry onwards:
You have to give robotics researcher Kathleen Richardson credit for one thing: she’s forward-thinking when it comes to moral panics. In a half-baked new paper, the De Montfort University research fellow is full of dire warnings about technology that doesn’t even exist yet in the marketplace: sex robots.
“I started thinking, ‘Oh, no, something needs to be said about this,'” Richardson told The Washington Post about her early forays into sex robot research. “This is not right.” Her misgivings culminated in a paper titled “The Asymmetrical ‘Relationship’: Parallels Between Prostitution and the Development of Sex Robots,” presented at a computer ethics forum in Leicester, England, earlier this month. In it, Richardson argues that the development of sex robots would “further reduce human empathy” and “reinforce power relations of inequality and violence.”
She also notes this may all be a tempest in a teapot:
Research on why men pay for sex has found, more than any other common denominator (variety, convenience, etc.), a desire for mutuality. Clients want to feel, at minimum, like a sex worker somewhat enjoys her time with them. In a 1997 study of male prostitution clients ages 27 to 52—nearly half of whom were married—a desire for sex was frequently met with “social, courting behaviors that were often flavored with varying degrees of romance.” Interviewing clients at a New Zealand massage parlor, researcher Elizabeth Plumridge found they “all wanted a responsive embodied woman to have sex with. This they secured by ascribing desires, response and sexuality to prostitute women. They did not know the true ‘selves’ of these women, but constructed them strategically in a way that forwarded their own pleasures.”
I’d want to talk to an expert before accepting this viewpoint – the context is too obscure. Is this a world-wide study? What percentage of johns fit this quasi-idealistic scenario – and how many guys are there just to get their rocks off? And how many are looking to slap the prostitute around? This certainly doesn’t fit into the stories published about enslaved sex workers.
To my mind, there are three groups to consider here: the johns, the prostitutes, and the robots. From what I’m reading, there’s little consideration given to the last group. The problem is characterization: is the hypothetical robot just something that rocks back and forth and moans a lot? Or, at the other end of a spectrum, is it a fully cognizant AI?
The latter assertion is not only more interesting, but more compelling for a couple of reasons. First, the technological urge to forever improve your invention (or, as engineers put it, fixing what ain’t broke) will result in smarter and smarter sex robots; second, as the johns realize the smarter robots deliver a better experience (which I’ll assert without supporting argument), they’ll demand better robots.
The subject appears to be quite complex. A fully cognizant AI … well, does it care about sex & relationships? If it cares about relationships, sex – if that can mean anything to a computational intelligence – may or may not be of interest. The reproductive strategies of an AI may be as trivial as duplicating the current state of the AI into hardware capable of executing the underlying computation; or it may be a complex game of crossbreeding the survival strategies of multiple AIs in a process conceptually reminiscent of biological sex. While human takeaways from sex range from pleasure to children, would an AI take pleasure – or anything – from sex with a human? Even if programmed to be capable, that is a different subject from programmed to actually gain anything useful from the activity. And that, in turn, presumes that an AI is actually programmed in the classical sense. While, if computationally based, a certain amount of programming will be necessary, the vast majority of the material will be data and derived algorithms – and, with respect to this discussion, that means it’s rather impossible to answer the question of the moment.
So, banning sex robots may mean depriving a general robot from a key part of the human experience: a supposition of worth that cannot be estimated – because it may range from 0 to infinity, in computational terms. One could accuse the Campaign of a quaint provincialism, if one was so minded; however, the subject is serious enough that the charge might come across as flippant.
Finally, TechInsider references David Levy:
But David Levy, author of “Love and Sex with Robots” told the BBC that humans and robots in intimate relationships will be a common sight by 2050.
“There is an increasing number of people who find it difficult to form relationships,” Levy told the BBC. Sex robots, he said, “will fill a void.”
This assumes a basic compatability. I have not read his book, so perhaps he’s already treated the subject, but that little quote, as out of context as it might be, strikes me as filled with dubious assumptions.
