Thoughts? Sex robots with the ability to consent

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• Developers from the sexual industry are looking at creating more intelligent and proactive robots that would be capable of giving and withdrawing sexual consent.
• Currently, sex robots are mainly programmed to perform sexual acts as their consensual abilities are still a work in progress.
• According to one philosopher, developing the robots’ ability to consent could have repercussions.

In a world where feminist movements continue to fight against sexual abuse and harassment issues against women, sexual robotic visionaries are looking to develop robots with consensual abilities.

Based on a 2016 draft resolution issued by the European Union Parliament, robots ━ aided with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) ━ would be programmed to have the ability to decide for themselves as they earn their status as legally electronic persons.

The draft states that the “more autonomous robots are, the less they can be considered simple tools in the hands of other actors. With that, “it becomes more and more urgent to address the fundamental question of whether robots should possess a legal status.” 

In this regard, the sex industry, with a $30 billion market value, is leaning towards developing more sentient sex robots to further gratify its clients.

When a robot becomes an eligible citizen of one’s community, he or she can withdraw from a non-consensual sex encounter by all means. One example would be Sophia the robot, who was given citizenship by Saudi Arabia in 2017.

Sharing their experties on ethics in relation with the law and AI, professors Lily Frank and Sven Nyholm said that “any member of the legal community who enjoys the status of personhood needs to give his, her, their, or its consent before any sexual acts are performed on them.”

It cannot be that the legal community does anything that can be construed as condoning what is sometimes called ‘rape-culture,’ i.e., a mindset by which non-consensual sex is normalized or otherwise implicitly or explicitly approved of largely as a result sexist attitudes, institutions, and patterns of behavior,” they wrote.

Nowadays, sex robots can already provide and retract sexual consent. Their capability to discern such consent, though, is still being polished since they can only simulate and not actually ‘give’ consent.

Philosopher Robert Sparrow, however, is against the consensual development of sex robots since it opens an opportunity to commit rape.

“Even when the intention is not to facilitate rape, the design of robots that can explicitly refuse consent is problematic due to the likelihood that some users will experiment with raping them,” Sparrow wrote in the International Journal of Social Robotics.

Ultimately, the philosopher touched the issue on a separate valid note.

“On the other hand, [if] sex with such robots is never a representation of rape—and especially if that’s because the robots have been designed so as always to consent to sex—then the design of sex robots may well be unethical for what it expresses about the sexuality of women,” he argued.

Source: The Swaddle