Summary: A substantial amount of British people are ok with someone having sex with a robot and don’t consider the act to be cheating.
A survey in England on sex robots and cheating may surprise you. With growing popularity for the sex robot industry and advancements in technology, the act of having sex with a robot is getting more and more real. The study found that 36 percent of people in Britain have no problems with having sex with robots.
Robots are starting to find places everyone in our society and expected to take over certain industries at some point. They are already making an appearance in the fast food industry and legal industry. Other places that they can expect to pop-up soon include as hotel receptionists, Robocops, office assistants, help desk, and more.
Sexbot manufacturers are able to put personalities into their robots, providing traits that people would like to have and some that you want to avoid like jealousy and neediness. With robots becoming as humanlike as possible, having real relationships may be a thing of the past for some, at least that is what these surveys are trying to determine.
Perhaps not so surprisingly more men than women, two-thirds of men, are willing to get it on with robots. According to the study, even more people of Britain viewing having sex with a robot as not cheating. The report in Metro states, “The NOW TV survey reveals that 40% of British people would not consider having sex with a robot cheating, 39% of British people think that by 2050, we’ll regularly be having relationships with robots instead of each other.”
A more disturbing finding of the study is that “21% don’t think it would be ethically wrong to harm an artificially intelligent robot and 48% say they’d feel less guilty about acting out their ‘darkest desires’ with a robot instead of with a human.”
There are a lot of connections between sex robots and pornography. Both involve sexual intimacy with someone or something that is not physically real but people largely consider pornography to be cheating.
Some wonder if the future holds a kind of Westworld theme park set of rules where there are no rules, laws or judgment and people can do whatever they please with robots at the helms. Professor Noel Sharkey said, “Robotics and artificial intelligence is a long way off the technical sophistication of the theme park in Westworld, but we’re already seeing dolls being used in the adult entertainment industry and we can expect robots to join them soon.”
Other scholars like Professor John Banzhaf of public interest law at George Washington University Law School urge the government to step in and place regulations on the sexbot industry so that manufacturers cannot create childlike robots or programs that allow a person to role play rape. One can only imagine what kind of twisted schemes people will concoct if given free range of programs allowing a robot to act as if it is being raped or a young child. Banzhaf said, “The obvious first step would be to have hearings and do studies to determine just how serious the threat is, whether there are any real benefits to having sexbots programmed to simulate being raped, and then what if any new laws, regulations, etc. might be appropriate.”
Do you think having sex with a robot is cheating? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
To learn more about the growing prevalence of robots, read these articles:
- Presence of Robots in Legal Industry Growing
- University College London Develops AI “Judge”
- Dentons Backs Univ. of Toronto’s Robot
Photo: bigthink.com