The Squishy Ethics of Sex With Robots
Sarah Jamie Lewis was thinking about an internet-connected cock ring.
As a computer scientist, she could understand the nominal use case. It was studded with accelerometers and other sensors. People with penises were supposed to put it on before having penetrative sex and record things like thrust length, speed, overall time of session … the things that sex experts tell people not to worry about but people with penises worry about anyway. And then—here’s the climax—the user could upload that data into a smartphone app. Anonymous, the manufacturer promised, unless you wanted to share. A social network of penises.
Lewis is a privacy researcher; this was where the bell went off. Collecting tons of data and comparing it against a dataset without giving away where the data comes from is no easy move. Ask Strava. “Whenever someone makes a claim that they can do anonymous comparisons I get interested,” Lewis says. When she started to look into sex tech, she wasn’t comforted. “The state of privacy and security in that world is pretty terrifying for something that’s so very quickly developing into a standard industry…. Not even basic security measures are being taken in that space.”
A self-described queer cyberpunk, Lewis often focuses on queer security and privacy—it can be a vulnerable population. So she decided to do something about sex toys.
Sex tech is huge, and getting bigger. It’s a $15 billion-a-year business transitioning from a cheap-plastic-with-a-motor-from-China phase to one that looks a lot more like Silicon Valley. Patent trolls have been sitting on (sorry) a famous 2002 patent on vibrators connected to other devices and each other—the so-called teledildonics patent—using it to extract licensing fees from sex tech startups. But the patent expires in August, which means that hot tension you feel is the prelude to a pulsing, ecstatic explosion (less sorry now) of internet-connected sex devices yet to come (sorry again).
Most of the world is ready to accept algorithm-enabled, internet-connected, virtual-reality-optimized sex machines with open arms (arms! I said arms!). The technology is evolving fast, which means two inbound waves of problems. Privacy and security, sure, but even solving those won’t answer two very hard questions: Can a robot consent to having sex with you? Can you consent to sex with it?
One thing that is unquestionable: There is a market. Either through licensing the teledildonics patent or risking lawsuits, several companies have tried to build sex technology that takes advantage of Bluetooth and the internet. “Remote connectivity allows people on opposite ends of the world to control each other’s dildo or sleeve device,” says Maxine Lynn, a patent attorney who writes the blog Unzipped: Sex, Tech, and the Law. “Then there’s also bidirectional control, which is going to be huge in the future. That’s when one sex toy controls the other sex toy and vice versa.”
Vibease, for example, makes a wearable that pulsates in time to synchronized digital books or a partner controlling an app. We-vibe makes vibrators that a partner can control, or set preset patterns. And so on.
Meanwhile, ad-supported streaming websites have devastated the traditional pornography business. Real numbers are famously obscure, though one researcher estimates that pirated porn on so-called tube sites costs the business $2 billion a year—and those tube sites are among the most trafficked on the internet. An interim alternative is “camming,” a live human being performing via webcam. Those performers see a business opportunity in allowing their viewers—for a fee, of course—to control devices they use on themselves, and in devices that they can manipulate for (on? With? This is prepositionally complicated) their audience.
Longer term, pornography sees a new business in augmented and virtual reality. (Porn is always an early adopter.) Some of those streaming sites already provide content optimized for existing VR headsets. The possible uses of haptic accessories are … well, I don’t have to spell that out, right?
The teledildonics patent has had a chilling effect on connected sex tech, but it hasn’t been a deep freeze. Sex tech with Bluetooth-connected smartphone apps exists. It hasn’t been worry-free. The company that makes the We-Vibe line of connected vibrators, for example, paid users $3.75 million in a settlement to make amends for collecting data on the patterns of vibrations people used—a main feature of the device—and how often, and for linking all that to users’ email addresses. A user just filed a lawsuit against the maker of the Lush, alleging that the company was keeping her usage data; that company, Lovense, was already dealing with a flaw that seemed to let it record audio during use. (Again, a major feature. The vibrator synchronizes to ambient sound like music, so the app’s software had access to the phone’s microphone.)
People call their private parts private for a reason. And dataspills aren’t the only risk here. “The vast majority of these devices have some sort of app that you can invite a person to control the device remotely, but that’s an active step,” says Brad Haines, a security researcher who under the name “RenderMan” founded Internet of Dongs, a website dedicated to analyzing sex tech security. “The problem is when you think it’s just between two consenting people and a third person hijacks it. It’s the same motion, same device, but the emotional implications of finding out it wasn’t the person you gave permission to? That’s when it gets weird.”
More than weird. If it’s illegal, it’s probably just hacking. But intuitively, it feels like assault. Like philosophy and ethics, the law hasn’t caught up to the technology.
These companies are new, or new to this game. “They’re where the tech industry was 15 years ago. They haven’t got a clue,” Haines says. “It’s not true malfeasance or maliciousness. It’s genuinely naïve. They’ve always dealt with manually operated devices.”
It doesn’t have to be that way, of course. Lewis proved it. Earlier this year she cracked open her We-Vibe Nova and connected it to the dark web. She let people send it commands—on/off, level of intensity—using Ricochet, a peer-to-peer chat protocol that uses the Tor network to anonymize messages and strips metadata like timestamps or logs. “It is, by what is possible today, the most private system you could come up with,” Lewis says.
Then she told the internet about it. Via Twitter, Lewis invited people to anonymously connect to her vibrator. She posted video. She put the code on Github. “Within five minutes I had people connecting to my dildo,” Lewis says.
This was more than just a cool hack. She built it to show that people could control a sex device securely, anonymously, and peer-to-peer. “No one else has to know you’re connecting to my vibrator except me and you, and in some cases even I don’t know who’s connecting,” Lewis says.
That’s a political and social win, exactly what Lewis is working on. “Queer people are more likely to be in long-distance relationships, and these devices can help bridge that gap. Sex workers are increasingly going online and using these devices to interface with their clients,” she says. Exposure of those uses, even of the metadata, could disrupt families, out people who don’t want to be out, and even put lives at risk. “A lot of my research, when I’m not trying to be destructive and break systems, is about trying to build a world where people can have more consensual relationships with their devices and data and each other.”
A 2007 book called Love and Sex with Robots was among the first serious flirtations with the idea. Its author, a computer scientist and chess expert named David Levy, takes the most panglossian view. “A fembot or malebot who not only gives great orgasms but also relieves one’s sexual tensions, provides new sexual experiences, leads a path away from boredom, and reduces stress could make an outstanding lover,” he writes. “So even in the absence of a strong emotional attachment from the human side, there will be ample motivation for a significant proportion of the population to desire sex with their robots.”
The first question, then, is whether robots will desire sex back. Even with advances in machine learning and algorithms that govern computer behavior, no one really expects a Turing-defeating, sentient, autonomous humanoid robot anytime soon. But at least since the roboticist Cynthia Brazeal’s pioneering work with “sociable robots,” people have suspected that machines could evince autonomy and affect. They might not think they’re real, but you will get tricked into thinking they are. So how should you treat them when they become sex partners? As my colleague Jon Mooallem once wrote, never kick a robot.
So one critique, as articulated by the Campaign Against Sex Robots among others, is that having sex with robots will lead to literal dehumanization. First it’ll be the robots (which could be shaped, horrifyingly, like children instead of adults), and then it’ll be actual humans. Robot sex, in this construction, is sociopathy training. A robot, by definition, always consents. Perhaps that’s not the best lesson for a user who is having sex with a robot because he already isn’t quite grooving with human partners?
It’s a bind. On the one hand, technology isn’t sophisticated enough to build a sentient, autonomous agent that can choose to not only have sex but even love, which means that by definition it cannot consent. So it’ll necessarily present a skewed, possibly toxic version. And if the technology gets good enough to evince love and lust—Turing love—but its programming still means it can’t not consent, well, that’s slavery.
Lewis may be onto something of a solution here: The robot does not have to look human. To be fair, it seems likely that billions of other women have already figured this out. (Please see my previous remarks about sex toys being a $15 billion business.) “Humanoid robots freak everyone out because of the uncanny valley. Whether you’d want to have sex with something that looked almost human is up for debate,” she says. “But we’re already in the realm of devices that look like alien tech. I looked at all the vibrators I own. They’re bright colors. None of them look like a penis that you’d associate with a human. They’re curves and soft shapes.”
If the only relationship people want with the device is a physical one, or if the device is an interface with a human partner, why have it look like a human at all? It could be, you know, better. “Swarm sex robots, you’d have a couple that would attach to your breasts and a couple that would attach to other parts of your body, and they’d do their thing,” Lewis says. “That might be easier to build and more pleasurable from a sex perspective than having sex with a robot.”
It might also invert the consent question. A sex device that uses machine learning to improve its performance for a particular human—even if just as an intercessor with another human or humans—delocates intent. “If you understand sex as a form of interaction and communication, and of understanding the person you’re having sex with, if part of that is removed through an AI interface, what does that mean?” Lewis says.
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Robot Sex
Part of consent is understanding context, and one possible future here will include economic incentives for hiding that context. Just as social networks hide the ways they keep people coming back for more, so too will sex devices conceal the sophisticated machine-learning artifice that makes them able to improve, to anticipate desires, to augment the skills of a teledildonicized partner. The makers of those devices will train them on databases of hundreds of thousands of people’s preferences, presumably.
It’s hard to consent if you don’t know to whom or what you’re consenting. The corporation? The other people on the network? The programmer? The algorithm? Maybe it’s just enhanced masturbation. “We don’t have solid answers to those questions. We might never have them,” Lewis says. “We might wander into this revolution in sex without knowing what it means.”
Which is the point, probably. Social stigma and the teledildonics patent have kept people from having these discussions. That’s not exactly true; it’s difficult to wander around the internet without rubbing up against sexual content. But the more serious questions about what technologically-mediated sex will look like are still in play. And they can’t be answered by putting more accelerometers on a vibrator.
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