Sex, Robots and Rock & Roll

A recent advancement by scientists at Lincoln University shows positive signs of developing robots that can help humans to build and establish longer-term emotional relationships with them. And in doing so, may also overcome certain thought-biases established in the human psyche. With the ability to express five simple emotions, this new technology could see our reaction to humanoid robotics possibly shift from revulsion to attraction.

ERWIN (Emotional Robot with Intelligent Network) the robot is the latest venture in civilization’s obsession with developing increasingly humanlike robots. By applying a set of “cognitive biases” (a series simplistic personality traits) the team have managed to give ERWIN a set of characteristics deemed ‘human’.

PhD student, Mriganka Biswas, explains that personality – quite obviously – has a huge influence on the way in which we develop human-to-human relationships with each other. Implanting a similar set of characteristics to ours, into robots should hopefully have the same effects on human-to-robot relationships.

The researchers hope that not only will their work help to build better and more realistic relationships between humans and companion robots (those used by the elderly or disabled for support), but also help psychologists to better understand how relationships are formed by children who suffer from austism and Asperger’s syndrome.

With this being the Science Sex issue however, we’re not interested in these quite sweet, extremely promising applications. Instead we want to explore whether there might be further, more sordid use for this technology.

Could we see this relatively innocent and revolutionary technology being high-jacked by those contributing to the development of sex bots or other technologies shown to be popular in the otaku communities of Japan?

Back in November all it took for designers to bring sexual gratification by robots to the male masses was an immersive headset, some pretty graphic Hentai animations and a rather substantial looking flesh light. The romantics among us will agree that there is one thing missing from this scenario. They’ve certainly mimicked the physical aspects of a sexual relationship but where are the emotional connections?

A happy ending requires far more than just a couple of pneumatic fist pumps and a bit of gentle monotone moaning.

Most will argue that building a romantic and responsive relationship with your partner leads to a far more important and gratifying experience between the sheets. Now that we’re taking steps towards building robots that can express and perceive emotion can we think about making the sex bot fantasy, a reality?