Abstract
Robots already assist humans in a wide spectrum of domains. As technology evolves, social interaction with robots will become more frequent and propagate into the most private social spheres. In his seminal book “Love and Sex with Robots”, Levy (Love and sex with robots. New York, NY: Harper; 2007) sets out his reasons for being optimistic about this development. His thought-provoking arguments have been opposed on feminist and ethical grounds. Feminists argue that sex robots reinforce gender inequalities. Ethical concerns centre around the outside and the inside of robots. First, it is argued that human autonomy is violated in human–robot relationships because robots cannot be part of reciprocal loving relationships. Second, it is worried that we will enter a “Slavery 2.0” if we program conscious beings according to our needs and preferences. I argue that with a certain conceptual understanding of the mind, these objections can be met. There will certainly be good reasons for resisting my arguments; thus the main point of this paper is to point out the importance of conceptual assumptions for ethical arguments over emerging technologies.
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Notes
- 1.
I should note that even though this paper is mainly about robot love, I cannot avoid talking about sex and “sex robots” (e.g. when considering the feminist critique of robot love). Both sex and love, as I understand them, require involvement on behalf of both parties, however. Since this is what I will be focusing on in this paper, I will mainly ignore the obvious differences between sex, love, sex robots and love robots.
- 2.
Note that this might also be helpful in pre-empting the charge of solipsism, i.e. the objection that in the future people will prefer relationships with robots rather than humans (and that this is wrong or will have negative consequences). On my view, solipsism should not be a worry because relationships with robots would not live up to the standards of human relationships. Thus, they can never be a proper substitute for them. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough space to discuss this interesting issue at length.
- 3.
Again, I would submit that even if Frigid Farah is a hoax, we would likely see these kinds of robots in the future. Thus, the issue is still worth discussing.
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Kewenig, V. (2019). Intentionality but Not Consciousness: Reconsidering Robot Love. In: Zhou, Y., Fischer, M.H. (eds) AI Love You. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19734-6_2
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