 Thank you. I was here in, well not here in 2016, I was outside Gullford somewhere in a field in 2016 at EMF talking about sex robots. I just started researching them then and I came back again in 2018 to update what was happening and talk about the stories behind the headlines. There were a lot of headlines and then I thought well why not do this again. So Johnty said come and talk about sex robots again. It'll be the third part in the trilogy. I mean I'm determined that I'll come back and do the prequel after this but for now I will go with this. So I want to talk a little bit about what's happened since 2016 and where it's ended up and these are the kind of headlines that really intrigued me when I started researching this. So I'm a reader in artificial intelligence society at King's College London. So in the six years since my first talk at EMF camp I've changed jobs. I used to be at Goldsmiths. So I've moved to King's and they were very accommodating and they let me keep the sex toys on my shelf in my office and they didn't kick up too much for fuss about it so they're very supportive. So I was seeing all these headlines saying things like this is the end of porn online because the sex robots would make a reality out of porn and that there would be real relationships. I particularly loved the Irish Sun's headline of Robot Wars. I've tried to pitch Sex Robot Wars at EMF camp and there was a negative response to that and then sex robots could reveal your deepest perversions to complete strangers and as every single person here knows anything connected to the internet can reveal the deepest perversions to complete strangers. So I've been researching all these different sort of things and initially I was met with lots of talk like is that really an academic thing to do? This doesn't really count as real research and all the sort of things you might expect and I looked at the love that we have for technology, the love that we have for each other via technology, love that is mediated by technology and people who love or in love with technology and I say love but I also mean sex but then I also mean love because it turns out it's not straightforward and it's not just about sex and one of the things I've learned over those years is that intimacy is really the drive and force here. So sex is part of it, pleasure is part of it but it's about closeness and companionship as well. So I've been studying things about the narratives of AI and desire where does that come from this idea? Okay so yeah I'll be looking at things like where the stories we tell about sex robots come from and it's got a really long history and if anyone heard that talk way back six years ago there've been stories going back to the ancient Greeks about creating the perfect artificial companion, stories about a woman whose husband died in battle, she asked for the gods to bring him back, he returned, he had to go again after three hours, she created an artificial version of him and took it to bed with her. So we have these stories that go back millennia and of course we see it in the sci-fi that we create today, anything from the femme fatale Maria in Metropolis right through to Ex Machina which is absolutely amazing slash terrifying film that I love and yet at the same time have problems with and the film her which of course the gentle version where the operating system becomes the perfect companion and then suddenly you find out that the operating system loves everyone else the same way as well. It's more kind of a again these are all kind of tales of dystopia. So what is the actual reality that's what I wanted to find out and where can it go in the future and we were seeing all of these headlines about it being you know the end of sex sex robots to replace women as men can't tell the difference which I think is very unfair to men most of them could have we got pictures again yet because the next thing is to show you what these things actually look like. So what actually happened was that the state of the art as I expected it from all these headlines was that there would be this army of wonderful femme bots Austin Power style ready to take over the world and what I actually find was there weren't any at all so despite these headlines saying that people were marrying their sex robots that they were replacing their partners with them there was nothing nor is there any large-scale project to build them so what there really is is a handful of workshops around the world couple in the US couple in China and they are doll manufacturers sex doll manufacturers who are adding in some automation and some robotics into their sex dolls and that's it and we all know how difficult it is to make a humanoid robot it's it's technologically complex it's financially expensive it's a real engineering challenge why would we even go down that route what is it about the idea of a humanoid robot as a partner that makes it so appealing because we know there's already a wonderful sex tech industry out there with all sorts of cool stuff happening so why do we have to make it look like they're human and like they're female because this is a very gendered thing there are a few male robots out there not sorry not robots dolls male dolls out there aimed at women and gay men but predominantly these are reductive female stereotypes that are aimed at heterosexual men uh so it's very gendered and then if you look at the sex tech market that's more interesting and certainly in the west the split between who's buying sex toys tends to be well it's fairly even at the moment in this country but it tends to be more tailored towards women so why is so why is there this obsession about the idea of a figure a a companion a life-sized robotic partner still no picture okay so i had some pictures to show you maybe i should describe them that way i did imagine your imagine your remarks and spencer's and one of the mannequins is in lingerie and propped up against the sofa that's essentially it's essentially what the rocksy true companion robot looks like where replacement oh yeah here we go so i've just this is the state of the art in sex robots today um rocksy true companion with a triple x on the left she doesn't really exist um she was we die at a trade show probably a decade ago and no one has ever seen a finished version since that was the prototype but the the guy who made her is incredibly litigious so i can't say it's a complete fraud um this the middle one i'll go to the right next on the right is samantha um sarga santos is samantha so sarga doesn't didn't make the body he used the body of a sex doll he was interested in the ai he was really interested in seeing if he could create a reciprocal algorithm so that the nicer you were to samantha the nicer she was to you and the more yielding she was um so this was the goal was to try and give samantha pleasure and that was part of his idea um he got some very negative press which i come to in a bit but he's now stopped completely and doesn't manufacture work on this anymore and then in the middle is kind of what is closest in existence today which is harmonies uh the real doll x the best creations um creation and she because i do gender them it's easier to talk that way um she is a doll with a robotic head and they're now working on some movement in the body but essentially a mobile from the neck down can't stand up on a row generally like this is not a robot right anyone who works with robots be going i'm sorry what parts the robot but there is an animatronic head this is actually quite good um i'd play the video but i can't because i'm on a pdf now um but this is matt mcmullen the creator he he runs real doll of his creations and um we went out there in 2017 to visit and i was really really impressed i did not think i would be and yet i was i thought it was these are very perfectly crafted pieces of art almost so on one side of me the kind of angry feminist was getting quite hit up about the body image for the other side of me was like oh that's actually quite impressive um so it's just a very cognitive dissonance going on there um this would have been the video because if you hear harmony talk she has a very soft scottish accent which is just bizarre um uh not bizarre that she's a scottish accent i love scottish accents um but bizarrely it comes out of this robot and it was picked because matt felt that was the voice that he liked best and he thought would mark it best harmony is now um available in different forms so basically you can get the doll and then you buy the robotic head and you can now apparently order the head it takes something like 16 to 24 weeks to arrive it fits on the bodies of their dolls um and that's basically the closest we have that and a company in china that makes similar um but much less artistically crafted versions um with similar things both of them have ai chatbot capabilities so it's basically a dirty talking chatbot um embedded in these dolls but the interesting thing about harmony is that there's a standalone app as well so you can download for 20 you can download this app to your phone to tablet um currently only available in the android um fittingly even though she's a gynoid um and uh and you can have your virtual partner more on that later so what happened after that well um apparently a festival of sex robots was coming to london after being banned in malaysia for being too extreme which was news to me because it was actually an academic conference that we were hosting uh causes so this is why i learned never put out a press release on a friday afternoon because by the time you get to monday morning it's gone all around the papers and everybody's phoning you going can i see one of these sex robots do you teach people to actually have sex with the robot no and no um so this was uh the love and sex with robots conference was banned in malaysia because let's face it it's a conservative country and they weren't too keen on hosting it there and city university in london wouldn't host it either um and goldsmiths well goldsmiths loves that kind of stuff so so fucking goldsmiths um and so i was there at the time we said yeah we can host it um and it was really interesting we had about 50 academics and we had about 50 journalists turned up as well um and it was quite insightful and actually the journalists got in on the questioning too so we were all having this dialogue going around um with everyone getting involved talking about it um and then we got some stories come out of that uh so you try to tell people that it's a very say a sensible academic thing and then you get these because moto's my favorite so the top one um i have not i have yet to work out how a hacked sex robot which remember they don't really exist could murder people i mean maybe if it was wired to the mains and it put it in the bath i don't know um the sex robot molested was the story was the samantha robot story and this is why sargey doesn't make them anymore he took the samantha robot to uh the electronic show and said to people yeah go ahead you can you can touch so of course people were immediately going wow i'm poking and prodding and that's what you do you know that's why museums put things behind glasses your glass cases because people want to to to touch and poke and pry with things that they've never experienced before but it got written up as molestation it got written up that this this doll this robot was sexually assaulted um a treasure which really wasn't the case and he took this really badly and decided that that was it he wasn't gonna work on it anymore has for the gosmodo headline that actually did come out of our conference because we were somebody at the conference was talking about essentially the problem with AI if you don't frame your question correctly um much like nick boston's paperclip maximizer if you give an instruction and you don't properly close the loop and tell it how to stop then it may be able to go on forever so if you say to a sex robot you must satisfy this person and they keep going and keep going and keep going yeah the things could get messy anyway not a problem because remember they don't exist and then we see some more headlines coming out like um the the new york times saying oh well we need is a you know incels are talking about the need for redistribution of sex so you were seeing seeing these headlines like i mean it's toby young we're seeing these headlines like what every incel needs a sex robot okay no um just no that's not going to work and actually for the book the book i ended up writing about this i had to spend some time on on incel forums um which was not a pleasant experience um but a lot of the what i did went looking for attitudes towards sex robots and a lot of them were saying no this is just another cope as in this is just another way of of um depriving us of sex with women because that's what they fail entitled to then things got weird weirder um so the following year i was supposed to run the love and sex with robots conference again in london and you know we booked a venue and it all seemed to be going okay and then about a month before how a couple months beforehand i got this i looked on the website and i've been taken off i've been taken off the program committee and i've been taken off the the website and i thought that's a bit that's weird and one of the main organizers who is shall we say i can't thank you for good word because it's not rude um so who's is unpredictable um he basically he had done all this and then like kept emailing him and not getting a response and he emailed back and said i've taken you off your own safety because we're getting death threats from extremists i was like what this is weird i haven't heard of death threats which we then had to report to the met police because goldsmiths didn't want to have some of you know extremist targets um so of course the police said they knew nothing about it um and it got weirder and weirder in the end i just put out a statement saying this is nothing to do with me this is out of my hands we're not involved anymore um and they ended up running it in a greek orthodox church hall in north london where they gave everyone coded directions to the conference via a poem and at this stage they're just going what the hell anyway um the guy who was involved with that um he is now inventing a death ray uh in militia so that was his recent story in the paper so anyway he's not involved with the conference anymore so the conference actually is going like after a few years everyone went okay this this is too weird so they've brought it back as an academic conference properly run without any weird right-wing trump supporting death ray creators um i i mean you really couldn't make us up so um so it is back as an academic conference again anyway i wrote a book so i wrote a book about it and it's called turned on because of course it is um and it was it was really fun to do and um the the left and the second from the left and it covers in the uk the gold one is the paperback cover but i really really like the polish cover which is the red one i just think it's such a good cover love it um and you can get it in german and apparently um the japanese rights were sold as well so i think i think it's available in japan but i haven't seen the cover for it so that was good i was i was fun it was a really interesting thing to do um and you know it's it's an academic book but it's a trade publication so it's basically set up so that anyone can read it but it's got its basis in fact um but anyway i digress so what annoyed me about all of this sex robot thing was this fixation on this reductive stereotype of a woman's body and i thought we can definitely do better than that so back in 2016 at AMF camp i announced on the stage that we were going to run a sex tech hack um and that we were going to host a goldsmiths which sent per kevin lewis into into complete tisney because he was about to take over a hacksmiths at the time and had no idea i was just about to throw him in the deep end but admittedly i thought what we're going to do is get maybe you know 10 people in a room and saw up some sex toys and you know hack them back together in different configurations what actually happened was that the amazing hacksmiths team indeed they are just wonderful they put together this incredible event they got we had about 50 people in a deconsecrated church goldsmiths right before christmas um and they worked in teams of four and five we got we kind of bootstrapped the whole thing so we got sponsorship in from sex tech companies um from lots of different sponsors tech companies as well uh we had musicians artists computer scientists um materials scientists all sorts of people from all walks of life all you know genders all ages it was a real wonderful diverse brilliant mix um and for 48 hours um worked on trying to break out of this idea that sex tech has to be in a particular form we got lovely coverage as well from the observer and the guardian um this is actually from the second one we ran because it was so good we ran it the following year as well um still still using that picture yes and this was where i would have shown you little videos so the people who were at it could spot themselves but i can't do that because the powerpoint's not working so we're on a pdf but i will put it online and people will be able to see it here's more pictures oh these were guests as well these were all animated um so i had a really nice kind of boinging rainbow dildo it was just kind of it's not working now i want to show you um but these are some of the things that that were created um so the first year the the winning um the winning team was lovepad and they created soft robotics that you could place anywhere on the body and if you squeezed the controller which was the kind of pump air into it and the controller was shaped like a breast and if you squeezed it it would they would curl around you it was really lovely and they for them to have done that in the the short space of time was just incredible one of my favorites was peacock which was just incredible so this is um the the motivation behind this was that you can tell um a rise all a penises erect when a rise whereas from vagina you can't tell but they took a vaginal egg with put moisture sensors on it um and when when the moisture sensors activated a big paper fan opened i made tweeting noises it was so cool and i just think that's so lovely because not just is that a really wonderful piece of art but it actually has has implications for things like prosthetics too which i just think is really really cool the following year um this one what i called a sensuous shawl and what they called a sex blanket um which is this this fabric this shawl with sensors in it so the idea being that if you're in a virtual or mixed reality environment and you see sort of rose petals falling from the ceiling the sensors will activate in the shawl and you'll feel them on your skin so it's about creating those experiences the central experiences it's not just directly um about um it's about intimacy as well as about sex and it's not just focusing on penetrative sex as some kind of you know the right type of sex so it's exploring and showing why sex is not just this sort of penis and vagina thing to the point of orgasm for a man that'll do a lot of the mainstream media take has been the default state um and then i love this picture so much this is by paul clark i love it because it reminds me of some kind of victorian anatomy theater and that's me lying on a kind of a hammock with these wonderful um inflatable tubes around me and when they flick a switch the tubes inflate and give you a big hug and i just think this is just such a wonderful thing um and if there was one thing that you know i would love to see the whole way through lockdown would be a way to give people hugs over the internet and maybe that's you know the closest that we can get to it for an eye while we're on the topic i just want to flag a few really cool projects that are going on in the sex tech space um so the um butt plug i o is kyle musulis um in san francisco uh q dot on twitter and he is doing open source um open source support for commercial sex toys so that sex workers will be able to have control complete control of the data um and he does lots of really cool stuff with that um internet of dongs is um white hat hacking for smart sex toys they've been quite a few cases in the past few years of sex toy hacks um and they've been really good at um going in and highlighting where the problems are there and then sarah jamie lewis who um wrote this book queer privacy a collection of essays from different contributors um and she's also put her her vibrator um on peer-to-peer uh vibrator usage over torque um so she's really cool as well so there's some there's some amazing people doing amazing work in this space but just to move on to where i think things are going to go in the future so i keep saying you know this sex robot thing i don't think it's ever going to really take off and what i think is much more likely is this ai aspect and the ai companionship so all the work i've done in in talking to people who are likely potential users of sex robots who tend to be the people who currently own dolls often the thing that comes across is that it's not just about sex it's about companionship um and that's a big part of it and and certainly the standalone app that real doll have released would back that up and um i have a phd student a wonderful phd student clloe locatelli who's working on this and she's looking at ai and sort of post-human sex work um and the way in which these things are constructed um and in japan there's the gate box which is sort of virtual holographic girlfriend and again these are very gendered and there's lots of questions about why is this you know why is this aimed at straight men what is going on there and i mean unfortunately i think it's just mirroring a lot of what silicon valley does as well which is you know tech created by white men for white men and you know we can't get away from that there's a big power imbalance and there's a big diversity problem um but one of the really lovely things from studying this for about six years is that there's now a community of academics working on the topic so this is like i screenshot this this morning so there's about you know two and a half nearly two and a half thousand papers academic papers on google scholar that deal with sex or what so it's starting to get some attention and fortunately a lot of them are also saying similar things which is you know they don't really exist why we get so worried but what can we do to make sure that we shape the narrative in a different way and then amazingly there was an actual headline that sounded okay the washington post said don't worry about sex for what's they won't ruin sex they might even make it better for some people remember they don't exist so what's next um i don't know if kevin's still here i saw him earlier and said i'm what can i say this kevin but we would like to host the third installation the third installment of the trilogy and do sex tech hack three-way or sex tech hack menage a tois if you prefer um we don't know where that will be and we don't know when that will be um but hopefully within maybe the next year um somewhere i don't know yet um it would be really nice to come back to it and look at look at this again so the first year we did it based on sex sexual pleasure the second year we did it on intimacy and sensual experiences the third you know go beyond that into things like companionship into like haptics of touch and and all sorts of things and biofeedback and you know take the technologies that we have uh the smart technologies the smart fabrics the um soft robotics and and make some really cool stuff um so yeah that's that's the end of my talk now i'll be floating around later on outside if anybody wants to come and chat about this um in true um emf camp style i tried to do a qr code for my book so no idea if i'll work on the screen or not but i thought i'd give it a go um but if you want to find out more about the stuff that i've been working on that's what it is there but um i did have another slide in my powerpoint version of kind of summary of you know what i learned overall i learned that i don't think sex robots is ever going to be a big market i don't think um that we need worry about that and i think that we've got other cool stuff happening in sex tech that's much more accessible and diverse that i learned that the community of doll owners who have been so wonderful and supportive in all of my research are really not what you would expect um i think the media has spun the tale of them being these very lonely weirdos in a basement with their with their sex dolls it's not that at all and i've met some wonderful people who have really opened my eyes to that a lot of the people who own dolls own them for a number of reasons and sex is often secondary to that um and i've learned that um there is so much passion for doing this kind of thing and that people are intrigued and that we you know it is research it does kind as actual research if we consider that sex is so fundamental to our existence you know this is what drives our species not everyone wants to have sex not but but those who do you know that it can become a very preoccupying thing so why don't we treat that seriously why aren't we giving it the respect it deserves not from a health perspective or a well-being perspective but just from a perspective of pleasure and of intimacy and i think that's something that you know we really we really can get behind um and say that you know we shouldn't make it taboo we should be exploring how everyone can be happy in that form so thank you very much