Love and Sex with Robots

In love and sex, the voice is a decisive factor. It not only matters what is said, but also how it is said. Pitch, volume and personal expression are important to attract and retain potential partners. The same goes for sex robots and love dolls, and is true for chatbots and virtual assistants with sexual orientation as well. If you are not working with ordinary recordings, they all need artificial voices (if you decide to use voices at all). The synthetization of voices, or speech synthesis, has been an object of interest for centuries. Today, it is mostly realized with a text-to-speech system (TTS), an automaton that interprets and reads aloud. This system refers to text which is available for instance in a knowledge base or on a website. Different procedures have been established to adjust the artificial voice. This article examines how the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) can be used for sex robots and love servants. Existing tags, attributes and values are categorized in the present context and new ones are proposed to support the purpose of the special machines. In addition, a short ethical discussion takes place.

The aim of this paper is to study the possibility of sentimental relationships between human and digital beings. We are interested in what kind of “other” a digital being can be for a human subject because it is the first step in understanding how our intimate lives will be shaped by the introduction of new digital technologies.

Today computer technologies are growing fast, and they are becoming pervasive. They are intertwining their digital content with every aspect of our everyday lives and they are placing themselves as our “companions”. This co-existence is so tight that it is possible to think of sentimental relationships growing between users and these devices. We will analyse these relationships from a phenomenological perspective by introducing the Japanese term riajuu [ ] which tackles the problem of having a sentimental and intimate relationship with a digital being. Moreover, thanks to Husserl’s phenomenology, we will show how it is important to discern the digital content of the “other” from how this entity relates to the subject.

We will show if the subject can build with a digital other an intimate relationship even when users know it is not a human person they are dealing with.

Computers have created a new world which enables people to have different experiences that may not be available or appropriate to have in the real world. Sexual activities are also a part this. Nowadays, sex relationships between humans and robots are set to become commonplace. The advances of new technologies need to be taken into account for new progress. It is not uncommon from the first neurophysiological evidence of humans’ ability to empathise with robots. Sex robots are going to be more focused in robotic industry in case of how they look and what rolls that can play. This study attempts to critically review the characters and characteristics of cutting edge ideas of virtual sex in real and virtual environments to provide researchers with backgrounds on what is going on in the future of sexual human needs. We have tried to find out advances, advantages and disadvantages sex with robots and virtual objects in different aspects. Most importantly, in this investigation we tried to find appropriate answers for some of the highlighted questions against virtual sex.

This article explores how human-posthuman intimate relationships are thematized in both robotics and in science fiction film, literature and robotic art. While on the one hand many engineers and computer scientists are working hard, albeit in an altogether affirmative way, toward the technological development of anthropomorphic robots which are capable of providing social assistance, emotional support and sexual pleasure, aesthetic representations of intimacy between man and machine give us on the other hand a more nuanced and critical picture of possible future forms of desire. However, these fictional works are themselves very often complicit with the use of familiar dualistic paradigms as male-female or self-other.

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of ‘becoming-other,’ scholars in critical posthumanism counterpose to this as an essentially traditional approach a nondualist reconceptualization of human beings and of the technological other, a reconceiving which is centered on ‘encounters of alterity’ and ‘unnatural alliances.’ The aim of this article is to expand on and to further develop these theories into what can be called a theory of ‘new networks of desire.’ According to this network idea, romantic entanglements between man and machine can better be seen as a specific form of power which does not leave us just where and who we were, but transformed. Desire is thus shown as a site for challenging our restricted self-understanding as humans and for transgressing humans’ self-centeredness.

Love has been described as unpredictable, immeasurable and non-purchasable and as such, poses challenges for anyone in a relationship to both stay in love, and to not fall in love with someone else. Scientists are still discovering whether or not love follows any specific recipe. Outlooks, personality, sense of humor and talent may not perfectly guarantee an individual falls in love with another, and more importantly is able to sustain that relationship. This article portrays a futuristic scenario in which truly intelligent and emotional robots already exist. Here, the bi-directional love discussed in Lovotics is not simulated through engineering, but rather is genuine from the perspectives of both machine and human. This is a theoretical piece that draws on psychological theories of love, sex, attraction, associated emotions and behavior. The method involves reviewing previous literature on human-robot bi-directional love, and combines it with current discussions and theories of the realistic future potential of love relationships between humans and robots with full artificial intelligence and emotional capabilities. The result of the investigation is a multifaceted projection of the complexity humans will experience in love relationships with robots. Due to the incalculable nature of love, affection and sexual attraction, the development of robots with genuine capacity for emotions may not have the best outcome for a future of love and sex with robots.

In this paper we present the Neurodildo, a sex toy remotely controlled by brain waves, which is pressure sensitive and with electrical stimulation (e-stim) feedback. The sex toy enables long distance relationship couples to have an option to reduce the lack of physical interaction and it is also useful for people with motor disabilities, for example spinal cord injury, who have difficult to handle a commercial toy and who can’t go to a place for dating. The system consists in: the sex toy with Bluetooth and sensors, the brain-computer interface headset and the e-stim device, in addition to a computer for running the necessary software. The first user wears the headset and the e-stim device, and by focusing in trained patterns, he can control the vibration of the sex toy. The pressure applied to the sex toy by the second user is measured by sensors and transmitted to the first user, who feels muscles contraction. The goal of this project is to design a sex toy that may be helpful for couples living apart but for people with disabilities, who have few commercial options. In this paper we explain the background and motivation of our work, and then present the concept and design process of the Neurodildo.

Taiwan has many social problems, including a low birthrate and labor shortage. In order to deal with these issues, some people hope that robots may play a robust solution. One of these robots, Pepper, is under the spotlight, because it is a humanoid social robot designed to express and read human emotions. In this context, my question is: what kinds of images of social robots do media construct for the Taiwanese public in order to shape the human-social robot relationships? Through archival research, I divide media treatments of Pepper into five categories: education, promises, reality, problems, and metaphors. News in the education category is fact-telling or educational news. In the promises category, news media not only indicate the Pepper’s functions, abilities, services, but also portray Pepper as a solution for social problems. In the reality category, news media report on Pepper’s functionality and limitations. In the problems category, news media point to problems Pepper might cause, including a higher unemployment rate and reallocation of wealth. In the metaphors category, I consider the metaphors media use to construct particular discourses and images of Pepper, such as a master/slave model power relation and gender. Based on business interests, technological determinism, and techno-optimism, these discourses compose the public imagination of techno-futurism media create. This techno-futurism is telling the Taiwanese people a technological science story about hopes, threats, and relations. Those Pepper images and discourses build the dominating understandings of social robots in Taiwan.

In this paper, I discuss the serious ethical issues that arise from the advent of childlike sexbots (CSB). The main question I will be addressing is: Is it morally and legally acceptable to create CSBs for therapeutic purposes to treat paedophilia?

Proponents of love and sex with robots would argue that a CSB could have a twofold interest: protecting children from sexual predators and by the same token, treating the latter. On the other hand, opponents to sexbots would contend that a CSB is not an effective therapeutic tool in treating paedophilia. It could even contribute to legitimizing or normalizing, in the eyes of the offender, the fundamental social, moral and legal transgression of having sex with under age children.

However, as a pragmatic observer of society, I believe that CSBs are inevitable due to the recent development of sexbot technology, but also because of existing demand. Thus, I think that a general ethical framework is necessary and should be drawn up, in order to help healthcare providers, lawmakers and judicial systems deal effectively with this technology.

Moreover, I devote an entire section of this paper to exploring the social and moral attitudes towards paedophilia in very recent history. I shed particular light on the strange case of the defence of paedophilia, by several prominent French intellectuals in the 1970’s. How did this type of moral relativism supersede for a time a moral absolute?

This work examines arguments postulated by sexologists, science and technology studies (STS) scholars, and similar fields to highlight the ways in which human-(erotic) doll relationships may move from taboo and into a realm where they may in fact be seen as the next step in human evolution. To do so, this work moves from privileging the human-human relationship to taking seriously the importance of the human-nonhuman-non sentient (NHNS) relationship as an equally important element in building the future and understanding the present (as well as admitting to the importance of the doll as an object of human affection). Here, against a backdrop of questioning what is love, I present two theories within STS: Companion Species and Actor Network Theory (ANT) to argue that NHNS things not only matter in the creation of human relationships, but examines how such relationships fill a gap in understanding how it is that humans may truly love their erotic dolls in a meaningful way that not only removes them from realm of taboo but views it as a reasonable, if unsettling, progression into a sociotechnical world in the twenty-first century and beyond.

The new generation of sex robots raises questions about a potential moral responsibility by human beings toward robots. In our paper, we develop a pathocentric approach to normative ethics that goes beyond the mere well-being of human beings by searching for a broader perspective that includes a morality towards objects. First, we demonstrate that the moral line between living beings (e.g. human beings, animals) and objects is much blurrier than it seems and relate these general considerations back to the issue of robot sex. We then discuss possible consequences of our approach, outlining in particular ideas on how sex robots will change our social norms. We argue that the influence robots can have on our norms does not only concern our perception of them, but also of ourselves.

In human-robot interactions research it is significant to question what measures humans will take to contest the challenges and what will become of them. Levy hypothesizes that robots will stimulate human senses with their many capabilities and humans will accept them as intimate companions because the human perception of intimacy will transform to accommodate various nuances. However, the question remains, how much humans understand and accept intimacies with robots. We argue that perceptions of human-robot interactions (HRI) and intimate interactions with robots have a certain impact on how individuals comprehend intimacies with robots. Long term contact with robots, in terms of robotic technology and conversations, will change our views and practices regarding intimacy with robots. Our study revealed that lack of awareness of the potentials of future AI robots has created a fear; fear of losing both tangible, intangible, and the sense of dominance. Yet, our participants’ intimate interactions with robots produced varying degree of responses that, we believe are revealing another scope of human-robot interactions.

Subtle aspects of a robot’s appearance may create biased expectations of the robot’s abilities, which may influence user acceptance. The present research investigated the perception of gender in robot design, focusing specifically on the proportion between chest, waist, and hips to indicate robot gender. We did so by conducting an online survey in Latin American context. The results highlight the importance of chest-to-hip ratio and waist-to-hip ratio in gender attribution and mind attribution to robots.