This article was first published in the January 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Imagine a world where you were the centre of the Universe! Where only your thoughts and feelings mattered! You could have the type of sex you wanted with another human being without any consideration of their subjectivity! You could in fact turn off your "human switch"! Does this world sound like a nightmare to you or a state of bliss? Well, you can already do this. You can do this if you buy sex. The technological utopians are now offering you more of this - you can do it with a robot.
What are these connections between prostitution and sex robots? In David Levy's bookLove and Sex with Robots, he proposes that relations between prostitutes and clients show a sexual relation with no empathy. This, he believes, is what can be transferred to sex robots, stating the "parallels between paying human prostitutes and purchasing robot sex". His book doesn't draw on consenting adult relationships for a future of sex and love with robots. He draws on prostitution as the model for his "utopia". A world that revolves around the buyer with no attention paid to the other.
Levy along with others is trying to make sex-and-love robots a more mainstream area of academic research. In November 2015, the Second International Conference on Love and Sex with Robots was held in Malaysia. This is a country with an estimated 150,000 prostitutes - although prostitution is officially illegal - and is also notorious for human trafficking for forced labour as well as sex. The buying of sex doesn't just affect adults. According to the Child Rights International Network, the "child-sex industry is a lucrative market as clients pay double the amount paid to an adult". European men flock to Asia to buy the kind of sex they want, where fewer political regulations and more economic poverty exists.
Some say prostitution is really "sex work". By being called sex work, the selling and buying of sex can be fitted neatly into the consumer market, along with waitressing, banking and the educational and medical professions. After all, we're all selling our labour, right? However, let's think about this for a moment. There is no profession in the service sector where you're allowed to enter another human body for your own pleasure. In fact, medical professionals are given special rights of access over another human body, and can act only from the perspective of the patient. Medical professionals operate according to the Hippocratic Oath, outlining good ethical practice: "I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm." If the medic stops doing this, it's called sadism and malpractice.
We live in a culture where people freak out if you come too close. Sex with another person, by virtue of its nature, is always intimate. The personal space threshold is crossed. But the person inside the body is not recognised by the buyer. This is shown in interviews with men who buy sex. They say, "Look, men pay for women because he can have whatever and whoever he wants" or "I feel sorry for these girls, but this is what I want".
We humans possess this wonderful quality: empathy. Autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen has called it the "glue of the social world, drawing us to help others and stopping us from hurting others". What happens in a prostitution-client encounter is you are allowed to "switch off" your empathy for another person. Supporting prostitution is encouraging people to stop being human. Do we want to encourage more of this by extending this lack of empathy to robots?
In June, I spoke at the Science Museum about the Campaign Against Sex Robots and Prostitution. It's focused on raising awareness in the robotics community about the ways gender, sex and race are imported into the design of robots. I'm all for developing robots but not if they further harm human beings.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
