Campaign Against Sex Robots warns of danger to women and children.

By Jason Om and Yasmin Parry.

A UK academic is campaigning against sex robots, arguing they are dehumanising, isolating and will encourage people to consider women as property.

Hyper-realistic sex dolls are already widely available, but sex robots are still in development.

Abyss Creations, the maker of life-size sex dolls RealDoll, has told The New York Times they are bringing the future of sex dolls closer by building animatronics into its creations.

Kathleen Richardson, a senior research fellow in the ethics of robotics at De Montfort University, started the Campaign Against Sex Robots.

“I want people to stop thinking about the word ‘robot’ and think about the word ‘property’, and what we’re being encouraged to do is have relationships with property,” she told the ABC’s Lateline program.

“So it’s really a new level of consumerism that we have entered into now.”

She argues that not only are sex robots “dehumanising and isolating”, they are also inherently sexist.

“While we live in a world which still considers women as property, then it’s not too much of a stretch of the imagination to start creating property that looks like women and then encouraging people to have the same sort of relationships.”

Dr Richardson is concerned that there is a strange complacency when it comes to sex robots.

“Let me put this way: If we were to create a robot that looked like an 18th century slave, there would be horror.

“But we can look upon women as these over-sexualised images in pornography and in prostitution and it doesn’t raise an eyebrow.

“And the reason why it doesn’t raise an eyebrow is because people still think that is socially acceptable to view women as nothing more than a sexual object.”

Therapy or deviancy?

Sex robots will be a topic of serious discussion next month at the Second International Congress of Love and Sex with Robots at the University of London.

Cybersecurity experts will debate the ethics of a future in which fully fledged walking and talking androids will take over menial tasks in the home, act as companions, and yield to our sexual fantasies.

Dr Kate Devlin, who will chair the congress, believes the arguments put forward by the Campaign Against Sex Robots group are narrow-minded.

“This sex work view is actually a very narrow perspective on the whole field, and also this emphasis that it’s objectifying women.”

She said robots can have a use far beyond just offering physical pleasure.

“This could have amazingly good therapeutic benefits.

“We’ve seen things like virtual reality being used to treat issues such as social anxiety.

“Taking that a step further into a physical realm, sex robots could be a really useful thing.”

But Dr Richardson is concerned that sex robots will allow people to play out dark and disturbing fantasies that are immoral and illegal.

“You got to ask the question, why are they shaped like fully formed human females or children?

“You can buy these sex dolls for as young as three years old and I’m sure baby sex dolls will be on the market soon.

“But why are they shaped like that? Because in the mind of the user they’re giving them the experience that they actually raping a child, that they’re actually having sex with a woman.”

Dr Devlin is quick to point out that legislation has already been put in place to prevent people from owning child sex dolls.

Earlier this year, the Australian Federal Police told the ABC that anatomically correct dolls that represent underage people are considered child exploitation material, and are therefore illegal.

Dr Devlin also postulates that dolls could be used to treat sex offences and paedophilia.

“For example, VR has been used, virtual reality has been used to check whether or not sex offenders are likely to reoffend by putting them in a virtual environment.

“There is a possibility for therapy for this as well.”

Falling in love with machines

It is not just physical robots that will be part of the sex robot future.

Remember the movie Her? The 2013 film starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson was about a man who falls in love with his smartphone’s operating system.

In China, a realistic smartphone chat bot called Xiaoice is already a reality, with millions of users logging on for hours to speak to the lifelike female artificial intelligence.

Futurist and tech entrepreneur Martin Ford, who was recently in Australia for the Creative Innovation conference, wonders how it will affect our relationships with each other.

“The issue of people falling in love with machines is very possible and when you’re talking about a kind of emotional response, it doesn’t necessarily even have to be a physical robot. It could be a chat bot…

“You can foresee a lot of dystopian scenarios where people really become attached to machines and sort of lose touch with reality.”

But Dr Devlin was quick to point to the benefits brought by smartphones and other technologies that promote human interaction.

“We now have a networked globe where we can talk to loved ones on the other side of the planet.

“We’re seeing a lot of social changes, social benefit through things like smart phones.

“It’s not all bad. Sure, every time a new technology emerges we get some kind of dystopian vision but there are benefits to this as well.”

This post originally appeared on ABC News.