Like Elon Musk decrying the rise of killer robots, Richardson is less worried about what exists than what soon will. She mentioned companies like True Companion and Real Doll whose merchandise looks primitive even creepy but may be a harbinger of sex works future. She also said some businesses planned to build models that look like children.
There are companies
that dont have animatronics but rely on the same idea, she said. Its a new and emerging technology, but lets nip in the bud.
Billing, an associate senior lecturer in informatics thats the study of information in Sweden, said that films such as Ex Machina, with attractive robots played by indie film darlings, ask big questions about what it will mean when machines becomes sentient. But these big questions can distract from the robots we already have, and how we interact with them.
To some degree, these robots already exist, he said.
I think that the actual machines that are out there are debated too little.
The nascent sex robot industry, however, defended its evolving product line.
We are not supplanting the wife or trying to replace a girlfriend, True Companions chief executive Douglas Hines told the BBC. This is a solution for people who are between relationships or someone who has lost a spouse.
People can find happiness and fulfillment other than via human interaction.
If sex robots still look like the equivalent of the Apple IIe, the philosophical literature on their rise is already quite deep. In 2007, David Levy took on the topic in Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships.
Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans, Levy wrote, while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach us more than is in all of the worlds published sex manuals combined.
Almost a decade later, he hasnt changed his mind. Levy also pointed out something perhaps obvious machines are already a part of our sex lives.
There is an increasing number of people who find it difficult to form relationships and this will fill a void, he told the BBC. It is not demeaning to women any more than vibrators are demeaning.
Asked whether male sex robots might also appeal to consumers, Richardson and Billing said that the majority of sex workers are women though, for the record, there is a male Real Doll.
Well, it will probably happen to minor degree, Billing said of the rise of male sex robots. There are certainly male prostitutes but not at all to same degree that there are female prostitutes.
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