Cast your mind back to the last time something gave you a kick of surprising new lust. You know what I mean, right? The little moments during sex when someone said something with a particular intonation and it caused you to melt from the inside. The written erotica that made just a few tweaks to the kind of phrases you think about when you masturbate, and suddenly opened the door to a whole new avenue of fantasy. Maybe you were scrolling through your favourite porn site, and you discovered a fresh way to position two subs for a beating that gave you… well… feelings. Cast your mind back to how you felt when you were last turned on by something that surprised you. Now hold that thought, and treasure it: it may be much rarer in the future.

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Earlier this week, my best mate asked me if I’d tried using ChatGPT to see if it could accurately do my job. I am fascinated by machines that can learn, because I enjoy exploring the philosophical implications of computers that can genuinely think: the same thing that drew me to sex robots a few years ago now has me salivating over the possibility that a chat bot might one day achieve personhood. But in today’s world we are less worried about AI ‘achieving personhood’ than ‘stealing our jobs’. So… is ChatGPT good enough that one day it might take my job? Can robots write sex blogs? I thought I’d test it out to see whether I was in trouble.

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“This is perhaps the closest I’ve got to one of my own ideas: that of a sex duvet made from soft and strokeable fabric that vocally rumbles as it is touched and that curls around me as I sink into it. My sex robot will be changeable at a whim: perhaps one day a bed made of breasts; another day, a series of vibrating and moving penises that talk dirty to me. Maybe sometimes both. Because that’s the joy of adaptable, personalisable sex robots that aren’t human, that aren’t gendered – they can just be what feels good at a particular time.” – Kate Devlin, Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots

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I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but our robots in 2018 aren’t quite at ‘Westworld’ standard yet. A couple of articles recently about sex robots and consent have led me to wonder if some people genuinely think our tech is advanced enough to create sentient humanoids, capable of a full range of emotions and thoughts. But even though sex robots can’t actually feel anything, should they be programmed to pretend? Specifically: can – and should – sex robots withdraw consent?

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There are lots of fascinating ethical questions surrounding the production of humanoid sex robots, not least the question of what kind of consent you’d need from someone in order to use their voice, face, or body when you produce a silicone replicant. But I want to state it here and now that I’d love to live on as a sex robot.

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