CEASEWednesday 9th October 2019
Professor Kathleen RichardsonDe Montfort University
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