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there’s a cave about 350 kilometers from
here it’s in the swampy Endora and it’s
called the holy fells sorry this is a
picture of the entrance to the cave an
archaeologists have been excavating this
caves it’s the late 1800s
and they’ve discovered there a number of
important artifacts from the Upper
Paleolithic era in June of 2005 they
announced a particularly interesting
discovery they had unearthed an unusual
object it was 20 centimeters long 3
centimeters wide it was made from highly
polished stone and its intended function
was according to the leader of the dig
team Nicholas Cunard clearly
recognizable so I’m gonna put a picture
of it up and screen now I’m gonna see if
you agree with him I’ll give you a hint
it’s supposed to be a human body part so
I’m not going to state the obvious but
artifacts of this sort have been
discovered in various sites around the
world dating back tens of thousands of
years this one was estimated to be
28,000 years old and you may wonder why
I’m telling you this I’m telling you it
because it hopefully illustrates the
long history that human beings have had
with the creation of artifacts for the
purposes of sexual stimulation that
history dates back to the Holy Fell’s
artifact but also through to the
construction of the first mechanical and
electronic vibrators in the mid to late
1800s and through to the dazzling
diversity of sex toys that are available
on the market today now in January of
2010 we got a glimpse before the future
of this industry in a lie at the adult
video network Expo in Las Vegas Nevada
Douglas Heinz the owner of a company
called true companion unveiled Roxy
which we billed as the world’s first sex
robot now sex robots have been a
long-standing trope or idea in science
fiction but it now looks as though
they’re going to become a reality and
indeed since 20
and a number of other companies have
entered into the market and developed
prototype models including most notably
abyss creations the makers of something
called the real doll who are planning to
launch a prototype sex robot in the
latter part of this year so I’m a legal
academic and ethicist with an interest
in the social legal and ethical
implications of this technology I want
to talk to you about some of those
implications today
now I titled my talk symbols and their
consequences in the sex robot debate and
that’s a title that I think probably
prompts a number of questions one of the
most obvious questions is is there
actually a debate about this topic in
academia and there is and when I talk to
my colleagues about my interest in this
topic they usually treat me with a
mixture of derision and bemusement but
there are some people who research this
we take the topic very seriously indeed
and probably the most notable example of
that is Cathleen Richardson who’s a
senior research fellow at De Montfort
University in Leicester in the UK who in
September 2015
launched something called the campaign
against sex robots this was modeled on a
much longer standing campaign against
killer robots which tries to
preemptively ban autonomous weapons and
Kathleen Richardson submitted that the
social consequences in harm that might
arise from the creation of this
technology were sufficiently serious to
warrant an organized campaign against
their development so what I want to
consider in the remainder of the time
that I have is whether this kind of
organized opposition to this technology
is something that we should take
seriously or not and I’ll do so by
discussing what I take to be the leading
kind of objection to the development of
this technology something that I call
the symbolic consequences argument and
I’ll try and explain what that argument
is by way of an example or a story so
don’t know if anyone here has ever seen
the channel 4 TV series humans these are
some of the actors from the TV show this
was the only image I could find that was
in the public domain so that’s why I’m
showing it and the show depicts a near
human future consisting of social robots
they’re ubiquitous people use them in
their homes and work as helpers and
carers and also
as sexual playthings the robots in the
TV series don’t have human level
consciousness or awareness although the
main plotline does revolve around a
group of five robots that seem to have
achieved that level of consciousness and
awareness and in one episode of this
show there’s a house party taking place
the group of teenagers there’s a robot
at the house party who looks like a
female woman and and she’s serving them
drinks and she’s cleaning up after them
at one point during the party a group of
young men started hurling abuse at the
robot one of them switches her off he
tells his friends and he’s going to drag
her upstairs and have sex with her at
this point one of the female
protagonists in the show intervenes and
says that tells him to stop and says and
would you do that to a real woman okay
so at this point the show creators don’t
stop and tell us what the logic or
principles underlying that objection
were like all good fiction writers
they’ve learned to show and not tell but
I’m interested in the telling I’m
interested in what the logic of this
objection is because on the face of it
there’s something of a puzzle the robots
in the show lack consciousness and
awareness so they can’t be harmed by
anything that we do to them and as an
aside this is an assumption that most
people within the sex robot debate
assume will be true for the foreseeable
future
that robots will lack consciousness and
awareness we may create such robots one
day but it’s a long way off so if we
can’t harm them why is it objectionable
to do anything to them and I think the
answer to that must lie in the symbolism
of the act or of the robots themselves
what they say about our attitudes –
towards real human women for example or
in the or and additionally in the
consequences of the act and this concern
for symbols and their consequences is
something that is shared by most of the
opponents to this technology and their
objection can be phrased as simple
logical argument and since I’m an
academic this is the form of expression
that I like so I’ll try and share that
argument with you now it has two
premises and a conclusion the first
premise focuses on the negative symbol
is
sex robots what they represent and what
the act of having sex with them
represents that it represents something
ethically problematic about our attitude
towards sexual norms or gender equality
and things like that so it’s a symbolic
acclaim the second premise then is that
if they have this negative symbolism or
negative meaning they will also have
negative consequences for society
that’s the consequential claim and then
the conclusion that we is drawn from
this by people like Cathleen Richardson
is that this means we should probably do
something about it that the creation of
these robots will have negative
consequences and we should do something
to avoid or prohibit their creation so
this is just an abstract argument that
kind of templates that people fill out
with specific examples of negative
meaning and negative consequences and
just to show you how people do this I’ll
give you two examples from the academic
literature of negative symbolism and
negative consequences the first comes
from Cynthiana GU – she’s a Canadian
lawyer who a few years ago wrote an
article called the robot cessation of
consent and her concern was particularly
for the way in which robots represented
women and just another aside here
presumably one day we will create robots
sex robots that represent men or the
cater to transgender markets and in fact
the makers of real dolls say that this
is something they want to do but there’s
little point in denying that for the
foreseeable future
these robots tend to be marketed as
heterosexual men okay so GU to you was
concerned about the way in which they
represented women I’ll just give you an
example of one of the robots she
discussed in her paper this is a robot
called repla aq2 it’s not designed for
sexual purposes but you can see the kind
of representation it has and in her
paper she comes to how love these robots
are thin attractive oriental women with
high-pitched voices feminine and
movements and they often wear these kind
of provocative clothing so she thinks
this is kind of reinforcing negative
stereotypes or norms of beauty and she
also worries then about the symbolism of
having sex with such an object
and so far as it represents women as
these passive ever consenting sexual
objects or tools and she’s then says in
her paper that this will have maybe two
negative consequences one is that a
little it will encourage young men to
treat women as sexual objects or else
alternatively that it will encourage
them to withdraw from society and become
more isolated and misanthropic in their
views that’s one example of his combined
concern for symbolism and its
consequences another example comes from
the aforementioned Kathleen Richardson
so in her paper on kind of launching the
campaign against sex robots she argued
that most of these robots are being
created with at the model of
prostitution or sex work in mind said
that the developers of these robots want
to create a an artificial facsimile of
the kind of interaction that a client
gets with a sex worker
so she focuses for example in the work
of David Levy who wrote a book back in
2007 called love and sex with robots
about the future of romantic
relationships with artificial objects
and he explicitly modeled the
development of these robots on the kind
of relationship between a prostitute and
a client so this is problematic for
Richardson because that relationship is
promised on a symmetries of power where
the client has all the power and treats
the sex worker as an object and so the
creation of these robots just symbolizes
that style of relationship and this will
again have negative consequences because
it will she says in this quote
legitamate a dangerous mode of existence
where humans can move about in relations
with other humans but not recognize them
as human subjects in their own right
okay so that’s two examples of this
symbolic consequences argument in the
sex robot debate so is this argument any
good is this something that we should
take seriously I certainly think that
the proponents of these arguments have
raised legitimate concerns or fears that
you could have but the development of
this technology but I want to close by
defending our put forward two
propositions that call their argument
into doubt okay so the first profit
position that I want to defend is that
the symbolic meaning of anything of any
representation or practice is highly
contingent and this has important
implications for how we approach the sex
robot debate so some classic examples of
this relate to the ways in which
different human cultures treat had the
bodies of the dead so most cultures
agree that you have to show respect for
the bodies of the dead but they disagree
upon the symbolic act that best
demonstrates respect a famous
illustration of this comes from
Herodotus as histories where he
contrasts the burial practices of the
Greeks and the collations so the story
goes that King Darius of Persia once
asked the Greeks what’s the appropriate
way to show respect for the bodies of
the dead and they said that the
appropriate way to show respect was to
burn the bodies on a funeral pyre that’s
what’s being depicted in this scene here
then he went to the collations he said
how do you show respect to the bodies of
the dead do you burn them on a funeral
pyre and they said absolutely not what
you that would be to treat them like a
piece of trash or a piece of rubbish the
way in which to show respect is to eat
the bodies of the Dead and the Greeks
founded this of course abhorrent there’s
something interesting here in this
example you have agreement on what the
symbolic practice should do but in one
culture as symbolic practice has a
negative meaning and in the other
culture it has a positive meaning and
vice-versa once you have this cultural
or social contingency and of the meaning
of a practice and this then has
important repercussions for how we
approach any argument that focuses on
the symbolism of an object or a practice
it means that we can’t treat the meaning
that we attach to the symbolism as
something that is fixed that’s given
that we just have to live with it’s
possible for us to change the meaning of
a practice and in certain circumstances
we probably should do that so to give an
example of this the philosophers Jason
Brennan and Peter Jaworski have looked
at the meaning that is attached to
commodified relationships and practices
and they use an example based on burial
practices as well to show
the circumstances in which we ought to
change the meaning that attaches to a
symbolic ritual and the example they use
is of the for a tribe in Papua New
Guinea who like the collations used to
think that the appropriate way to
respect the bodies of the dead was to
eat them until it was discovered that
this practice may cause a disease a
prion disease and so the practice was
outlawed and what used to be a positive
symbolic ritual became a negative
symbolic ritual so you have a case here
in which something that had a positive
meaning changed its meaning because it
had a negative consequence and the same
thing can happen in Reverse if we have
something that has a negative meaning
but it’s shown to have positive
consequences then maybe what we ought to
do is change the meaning that attaches
to the ritual or symbolism itself so
that means that in the sex robot debate
consequences become all-important what
are the actual consequence is going to
be of developing this technology if
Richardson and Goethe are correct then
maybe we should indeed prohibit or
regulate the development of this
technology it has a negative meaning and
a negative consequence if on the other
hand proponents of the technology like
David Levy are correct it’ll have
positive consequences which means maybe
we ought to change the negative meaning
that attaches to it
but that’s where my second proposition
comes into play I think that the
consequences of developing this
technology are likely to be highly
contentious or uncertain it’s going to
be very difficult to know for sure
whether it has a positive or negative
consequence for society as a whole now
why do I say this
well obviously we don’t have any good
information about what its consequences
will be this is a technology that’s in
infancy there’s no empirical studies
that I’m aware of that have been
performed about its implications for
society but we do have analogous debates
which give us some hint at what the
possibilities will be and in fact if we
are to follow Richardson and
prohibitively campaign or say
preemptively campaign against this
technology then we can only rely on
these analogies and one classic analogy
here would be with the debate about the
exposure to pornography okay so for the
past 30 or 40 years a debate has been
raging about whether exposure to
pornography has negative or positive
consequences for society according to
one recent survey that I read is about
40,000 studies that have been performed
on this question and if you read those
studies you’ll find many that show that
there is a negative consequence you’ll
find many that show that there is no
consequence at all they also find many
that show that there’s a positive
consequence and most of the researchers
in this field lament the poor quality of
the evidence that we have but it can’t
decisively answer this question so I
think when it comes to the development
of sex robots the same thing is going to
be true we’re unlikely to know what the
consequences will be so it leaves us
standing in a very uncertain position
we’re facing into an uncertain future
with this technology and when we face
into an uncertain future we have some
options and I think that the main option
would be to fall back on a commitment to
some kind of fundamental value so either
we embrace Liberty let’s say and think
that people should develop this
technology freely or we embrace
uncertainty and think that people should
be allowed to experiment with the
technology but we should monitor it
closely at all times or else we could be
highly precautionary in our approach if
there’s any possible risk at all we
should just avoid developing it either
way though I think that focusing on the
symbolic meaning and the consequences of
that symbolic meaning is not the way to
go thank you
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