Buyers of a robot engineered to be emotionally responsive to humans have been banned from having sex with it. The creators of the robot have specified in their user contract that buyers must not use it for "acts for the purpose of sexual or indecent behaviour."
Pepper, a robot created to function as a social companion for humans, is able to respond to emotional signifiers like laughing or frowning, but is not designed to offer any sexual comfort to its buyers. "Pepper is a social robot able to converse with you, recognise and react to your emotions, move and live autonomously," the website explains.
Pepper is the result of a collaboration between a Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank, and French robotics company Aldebaran SAS, and was released in June. Pepper costs $1,800 (£1,170) and sold out in the first 60 seconds of going on sale.
The clause in Pepper's user contract prohibiting sexual behaviour comes at a time when our intimate relations with robots are being called into question.
Earlier this month a campaign led by experts in robot ethics was launched calling for an outright ban on sex robots. The authors of the campaign argued that the creation of sex robots would perpetuate the "inferiority of women and children" and their perception as "sex objects".
And robots capable of satisfying our sexual desires aren't so farfetched. Sex doll company True Companion is developing a sex robot that will "always turned on and ready to talk or play". Known as Roxxxy, the sex robot is due to go on sale later this year.
This is not the first time Pepper has made the news. In Japan, the robot's emotional readings must have been a little off, aftera drunk man attacked it. According to reports the man was not angry with Pepper specifically, but was disgruntled by the attitude of one of the store clerks in the Yokosuka branch of SoftBank.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
