Some aspects of human consent to sex with robots1

Abstract

Abstract Part of the ethical debate about sex with robots concerns whether sex with a robot is rape of that robot. It therefore makes sense for us to debate what should be the boundaries of consent, decades from now, i.e. consent given by humans to robots. How will the sexbot landscape look in situations when it is the human who is consenting, or not, to a sexual invitation or advance by the robot? The sexbot will have responsibilities towards its human partner, and there will be moral and legal consequences if it fails to deliver on those responsibilities. An unresolved ethical argument employed by many of those who deplore the coming advent of sex robots is that robots are unable to proffer a meaningful indication of sexual consent, and therefore a human deciding to have sex with a robot is committing rape of the robot. A parallel question, as yet to be addressed, is under what circumstances should a robot be considered to be acting in a sexually inappropriate or illegal manner towards a human? And this question embraces some others, including: “How can a robot determine, with any degree of certainty, whether or not a proximate human wants or at least consents to sex?”; “What behaviours by a robot are permissible within the #MeToo context when the robot is exploring a proximate human’s current level of sexual interest in the robot?”; and “If a robot oversteps the accepted bounds of sexual behaviour with a human, who is responsible and what should be the legal consequences?” We discuss these issues and speculate on how the sex robots of the future will be able to conform to the ethics of consent.