Ethics of sex robots

[KevinM1]

I'm mostly concerned about what this sex robot will evolve into. Right now it's still far from a real woman, but it's a start to what might be a very advanced, very human like AI in the future. As this technology advances, it will become more and more of a replacement for human beings. I'm concerned this might condition people, especially men, to subconsciously expect women to be the same way as those robots - always available, never whiny, never with needs of their own... just entirely there to serve the man's sexual desires.

And if men become conditioned to have that on demand whenever they want without having to "put up with" another human, many of them might feel like they don't want a real relationship at all. I mean, why bother?

From a pure technological standpoint, in the short term I’m far more concerned with things like:

Our ever increasing robotic workforce (I’m not convinced that the unemployment numbers reflect reality)
Ever more encroachment on our digital privacy (including but not limited to the government intentionally weakening encryption)
A lack of net neutrality
Our nation being incredibly slow to react to digital threats, including our aging/piecemeal digital infrastructure

That said, I see where you’re going with this.

I don’t think the problem is with sexbots per se, but rather the idea of disposable machines that look like us, and increasingly learn to behave like us. It’s the kind of issue that sci-fi has dealt with for years (see: Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?, the Bladerunner movies, the first of which is based on that novel, the modern reboot of Battlestar Galactica, etc.).

For me, it’s more of a concern about creating a new, artificial form of life and how we treat it. I don’t think such a thing is possible for a fairly long while, if at all, but with AI being one of the next technological frontiers (and I mean true AI, not Siri-like parsers that identify keywords and spit back an answer based on simple predicates), it’s definitely something we should at least be aware of.

Aside: this is why sci-fi is awesome