Feminist Current writes: “At a time when pornography, prostitution, and child exploitation is facilitated and proliferated by digital technology, turning it into a global, profitable industry, that these products further promote. The objectification of the female body  constitutes a further assault on human intimacy.”

The malefactors in all of this, according to the website and its campaign against sex robots, are those technologies that are developed and backed by academic and business robotics and artificial intelligence communities, who have to date been the loudest voices shaping the policy direction about the benefits of sex robots, while largely ignoring the potentially dangerous effects on women, men, and children.

That’s definitely not how to win friends and influence people. I think that sounds mighty close to a blanket condemnation of all those working in robotics and AI. Conspiracy theories aside, that just simply isn’t true. Let’s connect a few of the dots for a little bit of clarity. The facts are that humans are going to continue to explore for themselves when it comes to sex.

Roboticist, Dr. Helen Driscoll of the University of Sunderland says: “The point is people already fall in love with fictional characters, even if there’s no chance to meet and interact with them. How many humans readily let go of their emotions and fall in love with a character in a movie? Plenty. David Levy, who founded the International Congress of Love and Sex with robots has outlined how machines will advance to form loving relationships with humans.

There are millions of people out there says Levy, who for various reasons. Don’t have anyone to love or anyone who loves them. And for these people, I think robots are going to be the answer with a suicide happening every 20 minutes somewhere in the world, with levels of clinical depression as rampant as COVID was or more, the World Health Organization totals out some 264 million people of all ages who suffer from depression, and that depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide and is a major contributor to suicide and the overall global burden of disease.

See related: Robots for the Lonely Crowd & Aching Hearts. There’s a suicide every 40 seconds!

AI is key to Levy’s evolution of human robot relationships. I’ve always felt, he says, that one of the difficult problems to solve with AI was human computer conversation, because obviously if you want to have a good relationship with someone, part of that relationship has to be the conversations you have with them. The current level of human computer conversation is still fairly primitive, he says, but it has improved in the last 10 or 15 years, and there’s an ever-increasing amount of effort being applied to developing that field. I’m pretty much convinced that by 2050 there will be software that can carry on a conversation that will be as good as one we can have with a human.

Somewhere in the run up to 2050, Breazeal’s relational AI will happen along to join the sex robot revolution with the sex tech industry. Today, in general, with an industry at $33 billion annually, according to Grand View Research (the female segment of that is 60% of the total), sex robots represent only a tiny fraction.

These days, going to dinner with a robot necessitates he or she be carried into and out of a restaurant. Definitely not cool.  

While we’re waiting for all of these tech dots to connect up to make the perfect robot partner, many case studies show people already currently living with robots. Buzzworthy has a few from its articles Inside the Life of People Married to Robots.

Just to whet your whistle a little, here are two strange but true cases: Number one is Ned Neffer, who married a mannequin’s head that he pushes around town in a wheelchair. And secondly, a French woman fighting for her right to marry a robot that she made with a 3D printer.

 As the Germans put it: Jedem nach seinem Geschmack (each to his own taste).

Indeed.