Controversy has come to a subject that’s a kissin’ cousin (sorry) to sex robots – child sized robots and allied Virtual Reality (VR) constructs for pedophiles. Aviva Rutkin reports on it in NewScientist (13 August 2016):
But what if dolls like these could help rather than hurt? Ron Arkin, a robotics engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Kate Darling, who studies human-robot interaction at MIT argue that virtual reality and sex robots might function as an outlet to redirect dark desires towards machines and away from real children. If it works, it could help past offenders reintegrate harmlessly into society as well as helping prevent those who have never offended from doing so.
I’m puzzled – should these two be considered expert on what is basically a psychological subject? But here’s one:
… [Patrice Renaud, a psychologist at the University of Montreal, Canada,] began to wonder if VR pornography could do better, and avoid the moral concerns posed by real pictures. In a series of experiments, he and his team showed that non-deviant men and sexual offenders both responded realistically to VR stimuli. …
But so little is known – what will happen if a pedophile is given free rein with a child sized sex robot?
But Renaud cautions that it may also have the opposite effect: a bot could normalise the behaviour and promote “the need to go further and to cross the line with real victims”.
A real dilemma. We may have a treatment for pedophilia to hand – or a tool for removing the last restraint for those who’ve not indulged. And we really don’t know offhand. If there’s some way to discover which we have, without exposing a pedophile to it, then that’s the way to go – but what if there isn’t? What if it’s just a matter of trying it?
Do you do it?
