Sex! Robots! Sex Robots!

A talk from EMF 2016 by Kate Devlin

On Friday August 5, 2016 at in Stage A

Welcome to a very up-close-and-personal glimpse of the future. This is a chance to explore the (hopefully) more pleasurable aspects of technology and artificial intelligence.

Robot care companions are already in use today. Are we at a stage where we can find love and sex with robots? What makes a sex toy a sex robot? Should we (literally and figuratively) embrace them? There are the ethical, legal and policy questions: should we ban them? Is it cheating? Is it consensual? What if someone makes a celeb robot? Or a child robot? Can they cure loneliness? Can they cure sex offenders? Will they rise up against us come the Singularity? And who will own all that sex data and what will happen to it? Why are all the current sex robots made by men for men? Why do robots have a gender anyway? And if we gave a robot genitals, what would they look like...? Come along, find out, and have a go at answering some of these questions and more.