Intimacy, Bonding, and Sex Robots: Examining Empirical Results and Exploring Ethical Ramifications

Robots designed for sexual interaction present distinctive ethical challenges to received notions of physical intimacy, pleasure, social relationships, and social space. In this chapter, we build upon our recent survey on attitudes toward sex robots with the results from a second, expanded survey that broaches possible advantages and disadvantages of interacting with such robots, both individually and socially. We show that the first study’s results were replicated with respect to appropriate forms, contexts, and uses for sex robots; in addition, we find a systematic concern with how robots might risk harming human relationships. We conclude that ethical reflection on sex robots must include a wider consider-ation of the impact of social robots as a whole, with finer-grained examination of how intimacy and companionship define human relationships.

Deus Sex Machina: Loving Robot Sex Workers and the Allure of an Insincere Kiss

This chapter projects possible human futures with robot sex workers (RSWs). These are models of robots with integrated capabilities designed to enhance human sexual pleasure. Using attachment theory as a framework, concrete questions about what might constitute human-robot sexual and emotionally intimate relationships are presented for discussion, including design and cultural issues. Mori’s Uncanny Valley theory is used as a springboard for a new model to include temporal and cultural influences on people who interact with robots, the Robot Accommodation Process Theory (RAPT). Finally, the ideas of how RSW will be normalized into individual human-robot relationships as well as how the relationships will be valued by culture over time are used as a premise for building theory in the areas of meaningful and affectionate human-robot relationships.

From Sex Robots to Love Robots: Is Mutual Love with a Robot Possible?

This chapter looks into the possibility of genuine loving relationships with robots (mutual love). Our primary aim is to offer a framework for approaching the question of mutual love. But we also sketch a tentative answer. Our tentative answer is that whereas mutual love between humans and sex-robots is not in principle impossible, it is hard to achieve. Nevertheless, building robots capable of mutual love may help to address concerns raised by critics of human-robot sexual relationships. Our discussion below generates a “job description” that advanced sex-robots would need to live up in order to be able to participate in relationships that can be recognized as mutual love.

Automatic Sweethearts for Transhumanists

This chapter asks the question whether sexual and/or romantic relationships with robots could ever be as satisfying as the real thing. Three main arguments are made. First, if we assume that robots will be not be real persons and instead simply behave and act as if they are persons (“pseudo-persons”) then love and sex with them will never be as satisfying as it is with a real person. Second, if robots somehow manage to be real persons (and not just pseudo-persons), we run into problems regarding their moral status and, importantly, their freedom to choose to be our romantic partners. It is more satisfying to be loved by a real person that freely chooses to be your lover than it is to be loved by someone who is programmed to love you. Finally, it is argued that the desire for relationships with robotic persons does reveal something telling about the transhumanist desire for total autonomy and independence. The only possible way for me to become completely independent is by cutting all ties to other persons, by making my own world, uninhabited by any real persons except myself. Robotic partners may consequently be the preferred inhabitants of that transhumanist utopia.

Legal and Moral Implications of Child Sex Robots

This chapter considers the legal and moral implications of creating sex robots that look and act like children. It does so by addressing the analogy between child sex robots and virtual child pornography. Entirely computer-generated child pornographic images are prohibited in many countries on the ground that (the majority of) people find them morally objectionable (legal moralism). If child sex robots were to be developed, they would (likely) be banned for the same reasons. Virtue ethics and (anti-porn) feminism explain why people find entirely computer-generated child pornography morally objectionable and why they would think the same about child sex robots. Both flout our sexual mentality based on equality, because they are respectively incomplete representations and replica of sexual relations between adults and children, which can never be considered equal.

Religious Perspectives on Sex with Robots

This chapter looks at the question of sex robots from a religious, primarily Judeo-Christian perspective. It addresses four basic questions: What is the purpose of sex? What in our nature might predispose us to a relationship with a robot? Could we have an authentic loving relationship with a robot? And, finally, would such a choice aid or hinder our spiritual growth? It concludes that while sex robots might make interesting, even desirable sexual partners, in the end it is God and each other with whom we must be in relationship. Replacing relationship with one another with relationship to a machine is ultimately a form of idolatry, a substitution for the living with something made, and thus controlled, by our own hands.

On the Very Idea of Sex with Robots

If a sex robot is a robot is a robot with whom (or which) we can have sex, then we need to know what it is to have sex with a robot. In order to know this, we need to know what it is to have sex, and what a robot is. This chapter examines the first question, what is it to have sex. It argues that having sex can be understood as a an epitome of being sexual together in much the same way having a conversation can be understood as an epitome of what Paul Grice calls a “talk exchange”. The answer to this question sheds some light on the second by telling us some of the criteria a robot would have to meet before we could plausibly have sex with it. The chapter concludes that as long as the sex robots in question do not exercise real agency, then sexual relationships between human beings will continue to offer something that sexual activity involving the sex robots does not.

Should We Be Thinking about Robot Sex?

Introduces the issues and arguments of the book. Sets the stage for the arguments that follow by addressing preliminary questions: What are sex robots? Do any exist right now? Why should we care about their creation? Sex robots are coming. They are robots with humanlike touch, movement, and intelligence that are designed and/or used for sexual purposes. Their creation raises important philosophical, social, and ethical questions for users and the broader society.

Is It Good for Them Too? Ethical Concern for the Sexbots

This chapter focuses on a corner of sexbot ethics that is rarely considered elsewhere: the question of whether and when being a sexbot might be good—or bad—for the sexbot. It claims that there is a surprisingly strong argument that it is permissible to design and create genuinely intelligent, ethically valuable robots for the explicit purpose of serving humans sexually. This argument does not depend in any way on the permissibility of human sex work; as far as the reasoning here is concerned, it may be that human sex work is always wrong. The argument is specific to robots, or more generally to artificially designed people.

Was It Good for You Too? The New Natural Law Theory and the Paradoxical Good of Sexbots

We normally think of the so-called new natural law theory (NNLT) for its as a relentlessly conservative sexual ethic, one which argues both for the rightness only of “reproductive-type” sex (and that only within a different-sex marriage) as well as the moral impossibility of masturbation, sex outside of marriage, and sex of a non-reproductive-type. On the face of it, the human intent behind the creation of sexbots, let alone with the act of having sex with them, would seem to be wrong on all these counts. However, this chapter argues that matters are not so simple. NNLT can reveal the intrinsic moral importance of sexbots. If sexbots and human each are beings capable of choosing and remaining committed to complete friendship, and of loving, then the embodied union that we do achieve will not be morally objectionable even according to NNLT properly understood.