Yesterday, Deborah Orr wrote in the Guardian about ‘creepy’ sex robots. She began with a statement from Noel Sharkey – a robotics professor at Sheffield Uni – who earlier in the week had terrified people by claiming that one day people might lose their virginities to robots. Shock! Horror! Misery! Woe! Another way to perpetuate the myth of virginity as a valuable jewel which people must save to give to someone special!

Deborah questioned this, which is good, but she then launched in to a lot of the same disappointing fearmongering about sex tech that I’ve seen before. Let’s have a look. And then a rant.

(more…)

Morning boners on a Monday morning? I’m spoiling you. Here’s two things for this week, which includes an ace blog about morning boners, a romantic artificial intelligence engine, and a chance to be interviewed about your sex life. I realise this is rapidly expanding into ‘more than two things’, which I hope you’ll see as a bonus rather than a flagrant disregard for my self-imposed brief. Here we go…

(more…)

The question we usually ask about robots is this: ‘could a human ever love a sex robot?’

I don’t think that’s the right question. In fact, I think it’s the opposite of the right question.

What I’d ask instead is this: if a robot were programmed to care for you, speak to you, hold you, and do all the other things a lover would do… how could you not fall in love with them?

(more…)