Are we ready for sex robot brothels? People tend to be OK with the idea of a single person paying for sex with a robot, but less so for those in committed relationships, according to new surveys.
Mika Koverola at the University of Helsinki in Finland ran two surveys of 172 and 260 people, who answered questions that measured their moral code, their sexual and emotional relationships, and their experience with science fiction as a proxy for their familiarity with the idea of sex robots. Then, the respondents were asked to judge the moral character and the actions of people in a scenario.
The story was set in the year 2035, in which the main character, who was either male or female and single or married, was on a business trip to a western European city when they decided to visit a brothel. Depending on which scenario was presented, there was a sign that read either 鈥淵ou cannot tell our robots from real humans鈥� or 鈥淎ll our workers are real humans.鈥� The main character paid in cash for the services they received, though no details of the sexual acts were included in the study.
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Overall, participants condemned a married person who visited the brothel most harshly, and a single person who did so least harshly.聽People who had more sexual experience were more permissive towards the idea of visiting a brothel, regardless of the nature of the sex worker. And women more harshly condemned the characters than men did. Koverola and his team will present this research in December at the International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots in Montana.
鈥淩elationships seem to drive how people morally judge the use of sex robots,鈥� says Thomas Arnold at Tufts University, who has done his own research on people鈥檚 views of this topic. 鈥淭he more you start thinking about it as something that could compete against or interfere with your relationships, that seems to be what people morally object to.鈥�
Sex or services?
Arnold points out that the scenario presented vaguely calls the sex act 鈥渟ervices鈥�, which raises the question of whether people really thought of this as sex. 鈥淥ur study found that most people thought of it more like masturbation or using a sex toy,鈥� he says.
Koverola says he didn鈥檛 define what a sex robot was, but let respondents use their own conception. 鈥淎 full humanoid version is the vision of sex robots that鈥檚 typically going around in the media,鈥� he says.
Sex robots aren鈥檛 likely to be fully humanoid any time soon, but basic versions can make facial expressions, swivel their heads, and hold conversations through an embedded chatbot. In Texas, a proposed sex robot brothel was blocked from opening by the Houston City Council, and in California, a similar facility is planned, though the owners have raised only 1 per cent of the funds they need through a crowd-funding campaign.
Koverola and his colleagues also measured respondents鈥� disgust levels using questionnaires that asked about moral disgust, sexual disgust and pathogen disgust, in other words how sensitive someone is to the idea of contracting germs. High scores on the pathogen disgust scale were strong predictors of people condemning the use of any paid sex worker 鈥� robot or human 鈥� but only for married characters. 鈥淲e really don鈥檛 understand this,鈥� he says. 鈥淭here is something somehow related to the purity of a married couple that may explain it, maybe the sanctity of marriage.鈥�
Koverola says attitudes towards sex robots may vary between cultures, and he plans to expand his surveys to compare those differences.
Reference: PsyArXiv,
