Robot sex and consent: Is consent to sex between a robot and a human conceivable, possible, and desirable?

Frank, Lily; Nyholm, Sven

doi:10.1007/s10506-017-9212-y

Cited by 60 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Manufacturers intend to equip the more advanced sex robots with expanded options of movement and ability to converse appropriately with their owners. In the likely event that robots designed to satisfy human sexuality and emotion are commercialized, ethical, psychological, and social issues regarding human-robot interaction will emerge (Sullins, 2012;Richardson, 2016;Scheutz and Arnold, 2016;Danaher and McArthur, 2017;Frank and Nyholm, 2017). On a positive note, sex robots offer the promise of limiting or ending prostitution, sex-tourism and human trafficking associated with sex work (Yeoman and Mars, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Friends, Lovers or Nothing: Men and Women Differ in Their Perceptions of Sex Robots and Platonic Love Robots

et al. 2020

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Physical and emotional intimacy between humans and robots may become commonplace over the next decades, as technology improves at a rapid rate. This development provides new questions pertaining to how people perceive robots designed for different kinds of intimacy, both as companions and potentially as competitors. We performed a randomized experiment where participants read of either a robot that could only perform sexual acts, or only engage in non-sexual platonic love relationships. The results of the current study show that females have less positive views of robots, and especially of sex robots, compared to men. Contrary to the expectation rooted in evolutionary psychology, females expected to feel more jealousy if their partner got a sex robot, rather than a platonic love robot. The results further suggests that people project their own feelings about robots onto their partner, erroneously expecting their partner to react as they would to the thought of ones' partner having a robot.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Friends, Lovers or Nothing: Men and Women Differ in Their Perceptions of Sex Robots and Platonic Love Robots

et al. 2020

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“…First, ought we expect the same sort of moral agency from AI robots as we do from people (see Bryson 2008)? Second, ought we extend moral or legal norms to AI robots as we do people (see Frank and Nyholm 2017)? Third, what sorts of legal constraints must be put in place in response to the reality of AI robots (e.g., related to consent, abuse, pornography, prostitution, pedophilia, and personhood)?…”

Section: Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Artificial Intelligence, Gender, and Oppression

Kerr¹

2020

Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals

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Artificial intelligence is the project of creating an artificial agent that has the same kind of intelligence as humans. It is found in many different aspects of our daily lives, e.g., virtual assistants, search engines, games, and health care. Oppression is a particular type of harmit is group-based and systemic. People face oppressive harms as members of an oppressed social group (e.g., gender, race, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, or (dis)ability). Through technologies such as virtual assistants, search engines, robots, and algorithms, artificial intelligence is contributing to gender-based oppression.

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“…Should sexbots be protected by being required to meet a threshold for understanding sex and thus being able to consent to it? The legal test for being able to consent to sex is deliberately set fairly low on the grounds that humans have a right to engage in sexual activity [56], yet whether and if so which rights should extend to sexbots is still to be agreed upon [19,23,60,66]. Thus, resolving sexbots' legal standing as persons, animals or things, or as unique entities is of paramount importance in deciding ethical criteria for how humans might permissibly treat and customize robots who are sentient, self-aware sexbots.…”

Section: An Ethical Framework Governing How Humans Should Treat Robotmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sexbots: Customizing Them to Suit Us versus an Ethical Duty to Created Sentient Beings to Minimize Suffering

Mackenzie

2018

Robotics

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Sex robot scholarship typically focuses on customizable simulacra, lacking sentience and self-awareness but able to simulate and stimulate human affection. This paper argues that future humans will want more: sex robots customized to possess sentience and self-awareness [henceforth, sexbots], capable of mutuality in sexual and intimate relationships. Adopting a transdisciplinary critical methodology focused on the legal, ethical and design implications of sexbots, it assesses implications of sexbots' non-mammalian subjectivity, balancing designed-in autonomy and control, decision-making capacity and consent, sexual preferences and desire, legal and moral status, vulnerability and contrasts between mammalian and non-mammalian moral decision-making. It explores theoretical, ethical, and pragmatic aspects of the tensions involved in creating sentient beings for utilitarian purposes, concluding that sexbots, customized manufactured humanlike entities with the capacity for thought and suffering, have a consequent claim to be considered moral and legal persons, and may become the first conscious robots. Customizing sexbots thus exemplifies many profound ethical, legal and design issues. The contradictions inherent in their inconsistent ethical and legal status as both manufactured things and sentient, self-aware entities who are customized to be our intimate partners augments existing human/animal scholars' call for a new theoretical framework which supersedes current person/thing dichotomies governing human responsibilities to other sentient beings. The paper concludes that the ethical limits and legal implications of customizable humanlike robots must be addressed urgently, proposing a duty on humans as creators to safeguard the interests and minimize the suffering of created sentient beings before technological advances pre-empt this possibility.

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Robot sex and consent: Is consent to sex between a robot and a human conceivable, possible, and desirable?

Cited by 60 publications

References 28 publications

Friends, Lovers or Nothing: Men and Women Differ in Their Perceptions of Sex Robots and Platonic Love Robots

Friends, Lovers or Nothing: Men and Women Differ in Their Perceptions of Sex Robots and Platonic Love Robots

Artificial Intelligence, Gender, and Oppression

Sexbots: Customizing Them to Suit Us versus an Ethical Duty to Created Sentient Beings to Minimize Suffering

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