About The Guest
John Danaher, a Senior Lecturer at NUI Galway comes onto the podcast to discuss these issues surrounding sex bots. His research interests are in the areas of legal philosophy, emerging technologies and the future of human society. He is the author of Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World Without Work (Harvard University Press, 2019) and the coeditor of Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications (MIT Press 2017). He has also published many papers on different topics, including the risks of advanced AI, the ethics of social robotics, meaning of life and the future of work, and the ethics of human enhancement.
Website and podcast: https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @JohnDanaher
About The Episode
One of the topics I have discussions about offline but haven’t yet really brought up on the podcast before is the automation of relationships and specifically sex. I don’t mean online dating which has been discussed extensively by now elsewhere, but rather the use of robotic sex dolls, more commonly known as sexbots. Though still a relatively new phenomenon there is a growing interest and use of these robots. My guest John Danaher will point to a few polls in the discussion, but from 2013 – 2020 in America there was a growing interest from 10% to 40% in actually using one of these robots. So if they are to become mainstream what kind of disruptions would follow, what kind of ethical implications will they bring, and how will the impact relationships in general?
Website: https://futureofsex.net/
- From 2013 – 1 in 10 Americans – https://gizmodo.com/nearly-1-in-10-americans-would-have-sex-with-a-robot-472622975
- From 2016 – 21% of Britons – https://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/bewildering-number-adults-admit-theyd-8368423
- From 2020 – 40% of Americans – https://www.tidio.com/blog/ai-trends/
