More than two-thirds of men recruited for a sexbot study say they would give sex robots try. About two-thirds of women in the same study say they would not try a sex robot. Those findings come from the first exploratory survey of human attitudes toward sex robots. Such research has huge implications beyond whether humanity ends up using robots for sexual satisfaction—it can also reveal gender differences in how people view modern human relationships.
Debates about sex robots typically focus on either the crude robotic sex toys of today or Hollywood's science fiction fantasies such as "A.I." or "Ex Machina." One U.K. researcher made headlines by calling for a ban on sex robot technology. But there has been surprisingly little effort to find out what people think about robots and sex in the real world. That is why researchers at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts set out to discover out what people think sex robots should look like and what uses of such robots would be considered appropriate. They hope their research can help create a future where robots prove more beneficial than harmful for human psychology and relationships.
"I think it's very important to realize that sex robots and companion robots are all instances of social robots that have an effect on people," says Matthias Scheutz, a computer scientist at Tufts University. "Especially when it comes to the potential of these machines to cause emotional harm to humans."
Previous attempts to poll public opinion on sexbots have usually asked just several basic questions about whether or not people would have sex with a robot. Scheutz and Thomas Arnold, a research associate at Tufts University, went for a more complex survey by having people rank answers to a wide variety of questions on a 7-point Likert scale with 1 meaning "completely inappropriate" and 7 meaning "completely appropriate."
