By CHARLIE NASH, October 24, 2016
A conference based on the industry and future of sex robots is set to be held in December at London’s “highly-respected” Goldsmiths University.
The Love and Sex with Robots Conference will take place between the 19th and the 20th of December, and boasts a current lineup of 16 doctors and professors at the event, where a number of related topics will be discussed including robot emotions, teledildonics, and intelligent electronic sex hardware.
The conference, which was originally due to take place in Malaysia until it was banned, is also encouraging paper submissions which will be compiled into “a special issue of the journal Computer Science.”
Professor Adrian David Cheok (Director of the Mixed Reality Lab), Dr. Kate Devlin (Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London), and Dr. David Levy (author of Love and Sex with Robots) are set to chair the conference, which will cost £200 for admission to the general public or £125 for students.
“Our research aims to carve a new narrative, moving away from sex robots purely defined as machines used as sex objects, as substitutes for human partners, made by men, for men,” said Dr. Devlin. “A machine is a blank slate – it is what we make of it. Why should a sex robot be binary? What about the potential for therapy? It’s time for new approaches to artificial sexuality. Cutting edge research in technology and ethics is vital if we want to reframe ideas about the human-tech relationship.”
Earlier this month, sex industry entrepreneur Bradley Charvet announced his plans to open a sex robot cafe in London, where visitors could “enjoy a nice blowjob from a sex robot” while drinking coffee and eating a pastry. Charvet also declared that if the cafe was a success, he would open another in Manchester with 24/7 service.
“I think it will be fully emotional,” claimed Futurologist Dr. Ian Pearson during an interview on the future of sex robots with Breitbart Tech in July, before adding that people would spend “about the same as they do today on a decent family-size car.”
“Now if you’re going to be buying one for that sort of money, you’ve got to buy one that you find attractive. You’ve got a wide choice over cars for instance, you’ve got to have a similar choice over robots. There’s not just going to be two models on the market, you’re going to be able to pick robots where you can customise their appearance,” he claimed. “People will design the robots that they’re buying as a home servant, or butler, or maid, or whatever it is they’re buying it for, and they’ll be customising the appearance of that so that they find it attractive.”
“In the same time-frame, artificial intelligence is reaching human levels and also becoming emotional as well,” Pearson continued. “So people will actually have quite strong emotional relationships with their own robots. In many cases that will develop into a sexual one because they’ll already think that the appearance of the robot matches their preference anyway, so if it looks nice and it has a superb personality too it’s inevitable that people will form very strong emotional bonds with their robots and in many cases that will lead to sex.”