sex robots: the end of love · stop prostitution and sex trafficking ease human loneliness prevent...

CEASEWednesday 9th October 2019

Professor Kathleen RichardsonDe Montfort University

Kathleen.richardson@dmu.ac.uk

Sex Robots: The End of Love

Sex Robots can….End child sexual exploitation

Stop prostitution and sex trafficking

Ease human loneliness

Prevent rape

Free people (men) from the trouble of relationships with women

Add excitement to sex!

Teach men to become better lovers

Be companions for elderly men (and woman)

But sex robots fed off new debates in robotics that people could have relationships with machines –The making of social robots was framed as a problem of loneliness!

Egocentric Paradigm – Individuals

The “I” Model

Everything is connected paradigms

The “we” models

Politics of each-otherClass, sex and race

Attachment Studies

Harry Harlow experiments 1950 ‘surrogate mothers’

Each-other paradigms

The “each-other” models

Vibrators, dildos and sex dolls

David Levy, author of love and sex with

robots interview in Scientific America

Normalizing sex dolls and sex robots in the form of women and girls by consistently featuringImagery of women with machine (drawings) and talking about the problem of female pedophiles

Re-branding of pedophilia (terms promoted by ethics of robotics groups and academic pro sex trade ‘queer’ allies)

Key words‘non-offending pedophile’

‘virtuous pedophile’‘pedosexual’

‘minor-attracted person;

All species co-exist with the other

Humans cannot survive or thrive with an other.

Animals cannot survive and thrive with an other.

In a world driven by commodity production and consumption you might ask why are they trying to

turn robots into persons?

What is behind it all?

I became a feminist in March 2016

Abolitionist Feminism

Aristotle – Virtue Ethics

People as property

Tools may be animate as well

as inanimate…a slave is a

sort of living piece of

property.

[Aristotle, Politics

1253b23].

The Master’s Fantasy

1253b23 ‘property; and like any other servant is a tool in charge of

other tools. For suppose that every tool could perform its task either

at our bidding or itself perceiving the need, and if – like the statues

made by Daedalus or the tripods of Hephaestus, of which the poet says

that ‘self-moved they enter the assembly of the gods – hustles in a loom

could fly to and fro and a plucker play a lyre of their own accord,

then master-craftsmen would have no need of servants

nor masters of slaves (p. 64-65).

We need to defend human bodies and intimate relationships from commercial exploitation

Robots and AI a reworking of property based on a rejectionOf Each-Other!

People as property –slavery

July 4, 1776 1864

Abolition of slavery - 88 years later

July 8, 1868

92 Years after Declaration of Independence

Corporate Personhood

Sex discrimination was made illegal 188 years after Declaration of Independence

Corporations had equal protection under the law before women.

The vindication of the rights of machines, therefore, is not simply a matter of extending moral consideration to one more historically excluded other, which would, in effect, leave the mechanisms of moral philosophy in place, fully operational, and unchallenged. Instead, the question concerning the “rights of machines” makes a fundamental claim on ethics, requiring us to rethink the system of moral considerability all the way down.

David GunkelPhilosophy & TechnologyMarch 2014, Volume 27, Issue 1, pp 113–132 | Cite asA Vindication of the Rights of Machines

Film

Her

Product

Male alienation and Attachment Disorders!

The Pyramid Problem in Robots and AI

The attachment crisis!

7.5 billion people living on planet Earth.

325 million of them are living in the United States,

126 million are living in Japan,

65 million are living in the United Kingdom.

A politics of loveI-Thou

Political protection of intimate relations between people – off limits from the market! Defense of humans and restoration of the fight for humans as different from property.

Recognition of empirical truth – we are not artefacts but are co-creating with EACH-OTHER!Rejection of hierarchical power and violence that values sexual exploitation and inequality