Love and Sex with Robots

Last updated
Love and Sex with Robots
Love and Sex with Robots.jpg
Author David Levy
LanguageEnglish
Publication date
2007
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint
ISBN 0061359750

Love and Sex with Robots by David Levy, first published in 2007, is a book about the future development of sex robots: robots that will have sex with humans. [1] [2] Levy claims that this practice will be routine by 2050. [3]

Reception

Kathleen Richardson of the Campaign Against Sex Robots wrote a position paper arguing "that Levy’s proposal shows a number of problems, firstly his understanding of what prostitution is and secondly, by drawing on prostitution as the model for human-robot sexual relations, Levy shows that the sellers of sex are seen by the buyers of sex as things and not recognised as human subjects." She goes on to argue that "this legitimates a dangerous mode of existence where humans can move about in relations with other humans but not recognise them as human subjects in their own right." [4]

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sex robot</span> Hypothetical anthropomorphic robot sex doll

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Kate Devlin, born Adela Katharine Devlin is a Northern Irish computer scientist specialising in Artificial intelligence and Human–computer interaction (HCI). She is best known for her work on human sexuality and robotics and was co-chair of the annual Love and Sex With Robots convention in 2016 held in London and was founder of the UK's first ever sex tech hackathon held in 2016 at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London and is the author of Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots in addition to several academic papers.

Although prostitution in Morocco has been illegal since the 1970s it is widespread. In 2015 the Moroccan Health Ministry estimated there were 50,000 prostitutes in Morocco, the majority in the Marrakech area. Prostitutes tend to be Moroccan women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds as well as migrants from sub Saharan Africa, many of whom are victims of human trafficking UNAIDS estimated the figure at 75,000 in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feminist views on the sex industry</span>

Feminist perspectives on sex markets vary widely, depending on the type of feminism being applied. The sex market is defined as the system of supply and demand which is generated by the existence of sex work as a commodity. The sex market can further be segregated into the direct sex market, which mainly applies to prostitution, and the indirect sex market, which applies to sexual businesses which provide services such as lap dancing. The final component of the sex market lies in the production and selling of pornography. With the distinctions between feminist perspectives, there are many documented instances from feminist authors of both explicit and implied feminist standpoints that provide coverage on the sex market in regards to both "autonomous" and "non-autonomous" sex trades. The quotations are added since some feminist ideologies believe the commodification of women's bodies is never autonomous and therefore subversive or misleading by terminology.

References

  1. Achenbach, Joel (2007-12-23). "Programmed for Love". The Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2016-09-07.
  2. Choi, Charles Q. (2007-10-12). "Sex and marriage with robots? It could happen". NBC News . Retrieved 2016-09-07.
  3. Lloyd, Seth (2007-11-25). "Wired for romance". Los Angeles Times. ISSN   0458-3035 . Retrieved 2016-09-07.
  4. Richardson, Kathleen (September 2015). "The asymmetrical 'relationship': parallels between prostitution and the development of sex robots". ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society. 45 (3). Association for Computing Machinery: 290–293. doi:10.1145/2874239.2874281. S2CID   17328664. View online. Archived 2020-10-18 at the Wayback Machine