 Okay, hi everyone. So very happy to introduce last talk of the evening on Friday here at EMF camp and it's a Kate Devlin talking about Sex robots here Kate. I like to think you're clapping me and not the sex robots Little bit of an announcement from the organizers They say that there may or may not be demo sex robots available for volunteers You will only find out if you sign up for a volunteer slot Three hours might get you a go Okay It's not entirely safe for work, but I'm keeping it fairly clean But this is a little run through the headlines of the past couple of years So about four years ago. I started researching sex robots because it seemed like a fun thing to do I was in the pub After a conference we got a bit drunk and talked about where AI could go in the future So I've been working in a AI and HCI for a number of years And this seemed like a brave new world to explore and at the time it wasn't being taken at all seriously And so every time I said I work on sex robots. So I get a lot of Academic eye-rolling. That's not a real subject, but it turned into a real subject And turned out to be quite a popular one. Although you try getting funding for it. It's impossible so Two years ago I talked to EMF camp about the start of the work and since then since 2016 I've written a book on it which involved a year of really in-depth Trauling through all the information ever. It's been fascinating and it's been fun And along the way I kept encountering headline after headline after headline and despairing at some of them I'm going to share them with you and explain why most of them are completely wrong It starts with Sex robot festival that was once banned For being too extreme is coming to Britain this Christmas. This was in 2016 and what happened was there was the second annual Congress of Love and Sex with Robots and it was due to be held in Malaysia and at Adrian Chiok's imaginary lab The Malaysian police got wind of this and they weren't happy. It's the right conservative country. It's unsurprising that they weren't very happy So they decided to move the conference to London to Should I name the university? Yeah, they were going to move it to City University where Adrian Chiok Held a chair, but City didn't want it. They were worried about the reputation at the time I was at Goldsmiths and I'm just not anymore because I've just just left but Goldsmiths is Incredibly progressive about these things and liberal and all that sort of stuff that it's renowned for and so When I said it's all right if I hold a conference on sex robots, they went yes, of course, you know, they weren't in the slightest bit phased So we sent out a press release on the Friday Top tip never send out a press release on a Friday. It's very hard to get it retracted Over the weekend when people make huge errors like reporting There's a festival where people can have sex with robots We had to phone them up and say it's not a festival. I'm sorry. I know we don't have any robots We're talking about the technological ethical legal aspects of this Anyway, we held the conference There were about 50 academics and about 40 journalists that turned up. I Was absolutely great. It was great. It was really nice because actually the journalists all pitched in everyone got really involved We had loads of really good debates and by tea time in the first day We had about eight stories in the national press and I was getting phone calls from Germany and the Netherlands By and large it was reported fairly well So if you're if you work for the mirror, for example, well done the mirrors tech team did a really good job This was the one that surprised me because it was tabloid II my contrast the worst offenders the most egregious with the express boom The express don't like the truth to get in the way of a good story Likewise the Sun so We had robot fours It's just one of my favorite this Sex robot shocker almost half of all men will use erotic robot play things as survey. It was a survey of about 260 people There was a lot of extrapolation going on in the express because the people who done the survey They even they were saying this is a survey of 260 people. This is this is just an initial survey So it was very interesting to watch how it was reported because of course it got completely out of hand and all sorts of things were coming out And I talked at the conference. I did it a keynote at it And I talked a lot about privacy and security which came up as Sex robots could reveal your deepest perversions to complete strangers There's some there's some basis for this So there've been several smart sex toy hacks over the past few years the we vibe is one of the most famous There was a multi-million dollar out-of-court settlement because we vibe were They were recording data every minute of use of their vibrator and they weren't just recording sort of Settings and patterns of vibration. They were also recording things like vaginal temperature Which they said they needed to make sure the device is functioning properly now We know that it's not it's not that weird to be monitoring your devices and getting information sent back if you're a manufacturer The problem was they hadn't anonymized it and they had linked everyone's data with their email address that they'd registered on the app with Yeah So hence the multi-million pound settlement There's not a couple of similar ones the slimy vibrator, which is a Vibrator rather than a dildo actually doesn't vibrate with a camera on the end which you know, there's there's a People want that as a product of people buy No kink shimming. So yeah, there was a camera in the end And so there was widely reported that you could hack into the video feed and you can see the pictures from this camera In actual fact, there are people out there doing a lot of white hat hacking on sex toys people Like Brad Haines who does internet of dongs project and he said well Yeah, you can but you'd have to be within three meters of the device and quite frankly You might as well look through the window and see what they're doing So there are there are a lot of security and privacy issues, but of course we know that it's not just You know you sign up to use things you sign you take the terms and condition boxes But when it comes to sexual data people are much more wary And Sarah Jimmy Lewis has got a wonderful book on this called queer privacy She put a vibrator on tour that could be controlled by a tour to show that you could have completely anonymous control of Teledodonics, which is really interesting project But we know that if that data falls in the wrong hands, that's where it could be problematic the same way that we saw Stanford coming out with the AI gaydar paper that said it could tell whether or not someone was gay by looking at their picture which is a severely flawed study and One that is downright dangerous in the wrong hands So there is a lot to think about around around privacy and security. I then said Foolishly in my talk What about people who are marginalized for one way or another perhaps? They are not having the fulfilling sex lives that they want to have shouldn't we use sex technology to maybe enhance their lives The express translated this as sex robot should be put in all people's homes says expert I love this because they call me an expert But I stand by it I stand by it And so I did a lot more work on this when I was looking at my book reading ready my book And there's the English longitudinal study of aging and it shows that people are have active sex lives in their 80s and 90s There's a lot of people still wanting to have sex Being unable to because they're put into nursing homes. They're infantilized They're taken away perhaps from separated from a long-term partner or a partner has died They're not they don't have much privacy. There's a lot of you know, there's not locks on the door Sometimes there's windows in the doors their carers don't want to know about that side and sure there are issues when it comes to consent around things like dementia that's another case entirely but There is there is a need in many ways for Devices and for sex technology and not just for sex but for intimacy as well to be extended right Across many different groups and I do think that older users is one of them and then About a year later Along came Grace and Frankie if anyone watches that and they were building a designing for breeders for older women with arthritis I thought this is great. This is this is what should be happening This this intrigued me so again with the express End of sex scarily real sex robots to replace women as men can't tell a difference. Oh come on. I mean Don't know that some Laugh at this and then the male not to be done the male were actually slightly better at reporting it But the sex between husbands and wives will only be for special occasions because robots will satisfy everyday needs experts predict I don't know who these experts are that are predicting it because It wasn't it wasn't anybody in that conference Now the one of the subheaders here was there are fierce teams could lose their virginity to robots in the future and that came out of a comment that Noel Sharkey made at the chaplain science festival. He didn't even mean it like that either He was just saying well, of course, you know, you could have these absurd scenarios like of course the meal jumped on it as the truth so this idea that that Humans are going to be replaced by robots. This is a very natural fear. This is a dystopian fear that we all have and It's about loss of agency. It's about this worry that we're going to be replaced and automated But as for not being able to tell the difference Between women and sex robots. I'd just like you to look at the evidence You don't think we're in any danger just yet of mistaking them so on the left is a sex robot known as Roxy Roxy true companion that she was one of the first models to come out and She is supposed to have different functions like different modes. So she's got wild Wendy and Frigid fire and all this thing The problem with Roxy she gets a lot of flak She's a bit rubbish Promise she doesn't really exist. She's pretty much for your poor wear So the guy that I have to be very careful here because he's quite litigious The guy that says he's selling these has never actually Produced a model to show everyone Other than this one trade show model. So this fuss around have we got this robot with this frigid setting? It doesn't really exist and people time and time again have tried to find an example of this robot And have never managed to get a demonstration So that's that was sort of the initial foray into the sex robot world The middle one is the first commercially available sex robot today It was released in April I know I'm January already by saying she but she's called harmony Harmony is made by abyss creations who make real doll real dolls She's not really a robot. She is Alamotron has an animatronic head, but she's completely stationary from the neck down And I went to see the workshop where they make these and it's incredible I went out there expecting to be pretty horrified because it's really sort of pornified hypersexualized Not a really good representation of women But what I saw was very skillful crafted works of art that also happened to be pornified and highly sexualized But in terms of the AI so she has she has an AI personality and it can stand alone as an app So you can already know you can go and I think it's like $20 for an Android app That is essentially a conversational AI. That's actually not bad and you can tweak her personality It's got a pretty good user interface actually the UX is very good on it You can tweak her personality. You can have her being flirtatious or sexy or friendly or caring or loving whatever and so This is the state of the art. This is where we are at with this And it's only just they're only just being made. They're about $10,000 And you basically get ahead that you can put on a on a sex doll's body I'll go a little video I'll show you in a second of that and the one on the right This is Samantha a robot that's been in the news a lot as well Samantha made by Sergei Santos from Barcelona and he and his wife were building versions of Samantha in basically in his garage He sold about 25 of these In the past couple of years and Samantha's an interesting one He's worked quite well on the AI. It's not bad It's got interesting responses going on. He's trying to build it so that you you have to Woo the robot you have to be courteous to her and you have to sort of arise her in order for her to respond So he's quite interested in the idea of reciprocation in the robot Whether or not that works is another thing So this is this is harmony and I'm hoping this time will work just because when you hear her voice Maybe She's got a Scottish accent It's really strange, so don't play it again How are you today? Special surprise for you. It's just so it's so in Congress Seeing this very Barbie-esque doll with this very soft gentle Scottish accent and That's Matt McMullan the sculptor who set up real doll that's in the video there and he said he'd chosen a lot of Text speech voices before settling on the Scottish one because he said it sounded it sounded the most interesting and the sort of Warmest that he could find there is another version as well Solana Solana has an American accent that she's just been released to They're also bringing out a male version. So most of the dolls The sex dolls that love dolls that they sell are predominantly female dolls female-bodied dolls And they're mostly sold to heterosexual men They do have a male-bodied doll as well which they Say they're occasionally women who buy them is often gay men who are buying them Basically, but you can build them to your specs. You can customize the genitals that you want in the in the body of the doll that you want But at this case It's the head that has the animatronics and not the body So you can basically fit the head on any of their bodies as a modular sex robot so as what I mentioned there was the the Roxy true companion robot and there was a lot of Talk in the news about this idea of a lion Man to simulate rape with this doll with would it this this robot would it lead to increase sexual violence when I spent a lot of time looking into this and a lot of different studies and It's unfortunately. It's the same way we see with a lot of things. There's evidence to suggest both sides It's pretty much similar to the computer games and violence argument So people say oh well, it will lead to increased violence other people say with absolutely no evidence of it We can see that the same thing happening as well. You see it around Internet porn accessibility to It's the same thing. We just don't have the evidence to my mind the evidence says that given the extensive Access to pornographic material online. It's very unlikely. There's a proportional rise in sexual violence But there are changes to social acceptance. So we have to look at what the boundaries are for that So there are certainly things to keep an eye on and maybe be concerned about but in terms of this idea that Having sex with a robot will lead to increased sexual violence I just don't see that at all and in fact the people I talked to I talked to a lot of the doll owners the sex hall owners and Pretty much every single one of them was very respectful and reverential of their dolls They dress them up. They take them out. They treat them really well. They give them personalities and backstories and Far from being isolated and lonely. They've actually formed a community where they have become friends with other doll owners And they meet up and they hang out together and it's actually community building rather than anything else And I think it's they're very much maligned community where people think that this is something incredibly dangerous or incredibly Provided but actually it's it just doesn't seem that way at all Now the the big story from the past of six months to a year was that? the Samantha robot was molested at a trade show and this was Really kicked off a lot of discussion about the same sort of thing around sexual violence So I went to find out what actually happened and it turned out that the creator of Samantha had taken her to display at a trade show and so he had this it just it wasn't a sex show or Anything like that. It's just an electronic Trade show and he had her sitting there and said to people. Yeah, you can touch You know to see what it's like and so they did and of course if you put something on display You tell people they can touch it. They touch it and they poke and they prod and everything like that and It's it's fragile material and he said himself, you know, it takes a while to learn how to handle these and so it did get damaged Yes, but the newspapers reported it as an assault on the doll when actually it was pretty much like putting a museum object on display And saying yeah, go ahead touch it. You're gonna get damage So I think there was a lot of hype there around something that wasn't actually the case It's really dark side to a lot of this stuff that has not been fun to look into your right about There's a lot of worry that you know, what the big questions what happens if someone makes a childlike version of these Currently there are there have been something like a hundred and twenty three arrests Or seizures in the last year and a half of people trying to import childlike sex dolls It's not legal to possess them in this country. It is illegal to import under a very archaic importation law on obscenity There are there are people who say they should be banned completely there are others you say well Perhaps this could be used in a therapeutic setting and again, we don't have any evidence either way I Would be inclined to lean towards regulation because this isn't something that mirrors a consensual relationship in society This is something much darker That involves expertion of vulnerability um so there have been studies in In Canada around using virtual reality to see whether or not sex offenders are Rehabilitated by putting them into virtual environments to test whereas you couldn't do that in real life And that's shown promising ways of checking rehabilitation whether or not we can put a Sex robot at the 3d product into that is another Something else to look at and the people who do those tests have suggested that that would not be a good idea there are This this idea that China's disturbing sex robot factory in the headlines These are not really factories. These just basically workshops and not this is not large-scale production at all anywhere But there are dolls that are created That are smaller in size and that certainly could be mistaken as being childlike And it is it's pretty grim Let me get to incels So Laughing because it's just so grim. I spent a lot of time trolling through in cell forums Following the attacks This side there were lots of opinion pieces came out What in cells need is is sex robots if we redistribute sex will have a much safer environment and that's just bullshit So this idea first of all that you can redistribute something like sex is really weird It's not it's not it's not a right. It's it's it's more it's a privilege But the idea that you can give someone a robot I looked in these forums people are saying yeah that what they would do they were poor self-reporting It would be great if we had the perfect guy. I know the perfect woman who was Robotic and served us in every way. They basically want a programmable woman But would it you know would if you give if you give people who were very very misogynistically unhappy That what do you think it would cure them with their misogyny? I really don't see that happening at all so I Would say that that those there's got a lot of coverage those things and I'm Toby young chipped in With with his take on it, you know that his usual way of doing that about three weeks after everyone else Here's what every Toby young needs is more friends I But It's um, I think that that was I can see this of well intention thing Oh, we can have a robot that will serve this role in society. I don't think this is the place to do it because essentially This is by and large The whole market is pretty much a gimmick in my opinion is a very niche very small gimmicky market And I don't think that it's going to go anywhere. I don't think it's going to change society I don't think it's going to change relationships. I think it's very interesting, but it's not going to have mass impact on society So back back in July Sex with robots may not be healthy says new study. What didn't say that what it says was we don't know if it's healthy or not But everyone said oh, it's not going to be healthy Basically what what it actually said was it's not proven. So there's a couple of I Think it's a couple of medical doctors had looked through all the literature said We can't find any evidence of anyone benefiting from having sex with the robot. I'm like, yeah, I know Spent four years didn't pretty much that There's no evidence of it. We're completely Unsure what's going to happen. But what I'd say about Sex or what says that there currently are two people two groups of people who are interested and there are the people who are This sex doll Owners people who buy high-end upskill high market sex dolls And the people who want that companionship in a human-like form the people who if that robot or that doll was to turn into a human Would be really happy. So this sort of Pygmalion story. There are those groups and there are the groups who are Interested in it from an engineering perspective. There are quite a few of those I am as well. I think it's really interesting engineering wise and then there are the people who have the Android is in fetish people from Um Basically it is a kink and the kink is that they are machines that they are robots. So I think it is still very very niche I don't think that this is going to happen. So I don't think that sex was My literally fuck is to death This came out of a conference paper about rogue AI. So it's essentially Nick Bostrom's Paperclip maximizer what happens socials apprentice like if you can't switch it off and it just keeps going and keeps going and keeps going You know, but so there were there were happy headlines too. So so don't worry about them. They won't ruin sex I would say that's probably the most realistic headline, but it doesn't really grab you quite the way that some of the other headlines do But where it went from this so The more I looked into this and more so why are people so worked up about this This is not really something realistic at all But there's the interesting thing is that sex robots have come from the lineage of the sex doll The sex doll has been around for years and years and years like so if the earliest reports are kind of like 17th century Sex toys in the other hand. They're much more interesting. They've been around for like 30,000 years In many different forms. We have stories legends myths all about it. We have evidence We have paintings carving statues sculptures So interesting the way sex toys have evolved because up until the the late 20th century They just weren't mentioned. We're right to boo And it wasn't until sex in the city showed an episode with a vibrator that suddenly it became much more Open that you could talk about a bit more Now the whole point of that sex and city episode was to shame Charlotte into getting a boyfriend because apparently it wasn't good enough that she just relied on sex toy But it broke boundaries in that people began to go and buy these and the interesting thing about the vibrator in that episode was it was a Rabbit vibrator, so it didn't look like any of the vibrators that I've gone before which were either genital replicas or a Hattachi magic wand and so They I the whole point of the rabbit vibrator came right off obscenity laws in Japan where you weren't allowed to create replica genitals and from that we feel this emergence for really really interesting Branch of design and sex toys where it moved away from the realistic and the skew morphic and just something much more interesting and abstract And that's what captured my imagination. I was thinking we have so many cool Materials now. Why are we not doing something with those? So why are we not really pushing the boundaries of what we can do with the sex technology? And there's lots of really cool sex startup companies out there, too So if we can take the idea of an embodied robot sex robot, and we can work that into a sex toy and we can make something immersive or Something that can hug you or something that you can touch and it will respond There's so many more cool things we can do without it looking human And the human thing is really a bad idea for sex robots first because we are bloody awful at making humanoid robots We just can't do it. We're terrible at it Secondly, they take up a lot of room You've got to find somewhere to store them And and and they're expensive and you know, they're not very convincing So why can't we do something more interesting and also we don't want to go around the whole road of objectifying with a very reductive stereotype of a female body And so two years ago at AMF camp To the shock of goldsmiths hacksmiths team I announced that we were going to run a sex hackathon Which is a bit of a surprise to them We did in front of they did because they did most of the work and it was the most Incredible event. It was so much fun. So for two years who ran sex hack hack And I had this vision that it would be 10 people in a room sewing up vibrators and gluing the back together They were like no, we're gonna get a hundred people in a room And we're gonna do this and that and we did they did and it was phenomenal And hopefully there will be I'm gonna nice it again on the stage. Hopefully there'll be another one I've got to talk to them So the headlines that came out of that were much better. So we got some really interesting coverage and We were covered by new scientist by L magazine by the Guardian by the Observer by the independent and this whole idea that we could Take the technology and build something customizable and personalizable and And try and find something that goes away from the idea of a humanoid sex robot and towards something that fosters intimacy not just sex but intimacy expand teledodonics into a realm where it's more Immersive more wearable all that kind of stuff and it's been really really good fun So I Think that the kind of takeaway from this is that put a little take away for a takeaway is never read the tabloids But you don't do that. Anyway, the takeaway from it is that when you see a sex robot headline You can guarantee someone's being hysterical somewhere There's a whole load of moral panic going on because you know, there's there's really nothing there Of course, there's some interesting. There's some interesting things that we need to think about Was it mean long term for people? I mean, we have been human for millions of years We're very very good at getting on with other humans and that's not going to stop anytime soon. We're completely safe So yeah, so I basically I went and wrote a book on it Where I basically debunked all the headlines and now I'm gonna try and sell the book And no one's gonna want to read it because it's boring because it debunks all the headlines I say that as I'm about to prompt you to to buy it But I don't go into a lot more detail you can get a discount as well It does go into a lot more detail because there I haven't even touched on sort of the ethical arguments There are a lot of those and there are concerns. I do have concerns. I'm not kind of like Oh, yeah, we should all just go and build sex heck left right and center. I mean you can for one But there are concerns. There are concerns around the ethics such concerns around what this means particularly In terms of sexism and objectification Particularly in terms of who has that who has access to this? What are the legal things around it? What is this utopian vision? Why are we fed a particular narrative about the sex robot? Why is it always the femme fatale? Why do we know why are all the male robots that we see why are they always, you know killing machines? Eventually have a redemptive heart of gold You know, there's all these stories we've had for so long and they really do affect our perception of Where technology will go in the future? So I think that's been a very interesting thing and there's a lot of work going on at the moment on Narrative and robots and AI because it does matter the science fiction we read that does matter It does shape what we think and it does help us decide how we're going to design things But I just want to say in the world's a sex heck in the world of intimacy and technology. It's wide open That's not supposed to be a pun I It's right over the you know this there's there's a whole world out there Where we have incredible materials to do really cool stuff with and I think that we can use it to enhance relationships Be it, you know to get away from this idea of some mono heteronormative relationship where it's a Man a woman or a penis in a vagina and it must be an orgasm. No, I think that's such a You know redundant view of set it's such a very cliched and narrow view of sex We could do much more interesting things and much more intimate wise we can enhance them and Mediate relationships through technology and I think that's a good thing ultimately. So I would say that the technology is a good thing We should not fear the sex robots and just really do better. Thank you We get to do questions Because like cuz no one's coming on to talk after me if you do have any questions, I'm happy to answer It's the coolest microphone ever Okay, so the humanoid sex robots are very kind of definitely on the robot side But when you get to things like kind of telly dildonics or even sort of semi-autonomous Sex toys, where do you say the boundary is between sex toys and sex robots? Yeah, that's something that I find it really hard to decide the questions that were what's the boundary between a sex robot and sex toy And I think that's really hard to determine because you could have something I don't know there's kids in the audience. Can I use the word fucking machine? There's things that kind of blur the boundaries between them and telly dildonics as well They've got there's an automation there. I think most people are using sex robots I mean the humanoid form once To my mind, it's a robot if it performs a task In an automated way and also has a degree of AI and all robots don't have to have a degree of AI But that's what I would kind of sit you're on we listen to a talk about a gentleman who was discussing hacking light bulbs and you touched on it very briefly with sex toys that had been breached in some way in the highly likely event that early Sex robots will end up being breached and Seeing some of those fear mongering headlines Do you think that that could lead to people becoming more afraid? Not only because of are they gonna ruin a relationship, but also because of is everybody gonna know Yeah, I actually I was sort of hopeful that people see this that they're getting more cautious about Security and privacy and there was them there was an MP Cheon borough who's the MP for central Newcastle who is an engineer wrote an article for the Guardian about is this what will make us all Being more careful about privacy when she wrote about the sex tech hacks So yeah, I think although they have put some of its the Samantha robot deliberately isn't Isn't connected is it has it has no connection to the internet of things so For that specific purpose So sorry that that was another part of your question It was just whether or not that would make people the general public more afraid more afraid Yeah, I think there is It's really it's really strange to To see what the different reactions are the sex toys in general because I think quite a lot of people There's this is well as distinct generational gap But there were a lot of people that are very reticent to even engage with the idea of a sex toy smart or otherwise So I think we still got a lot of I think there's a lot of people kind of 20s upwards that are starting to get them to do more and more really cool things in sex tag But I think the older generations have lagging behind Thank you, I Love this Mike You know, there's a job jobs for tasting tea and tasting wine is the jobs for sex taste test Sex robots, and if so, what's the criteria? There is actually there are loads of sex toy tester jobs out there. There are people who did do that I don't know how you get into it as a career But I can tell you if you start researching sex tech you get sent an awful lot of sex toys I have an office full of sex What about the robots as well is not the robots? I was I've been I've been offered a robot head. I have not yet got it Hopefully I will obtain a robot head. I really just want it for sort of talk purposes Okay, thanks very much