Why Sex Robots Should Fear Us

Abstract

Should we make sex robots? We explore a line of concern underrepresented in this emerging debate, arguing for caution in their development. Today’s sex robots cannot suffer because they lack sentience. However, future sex robots that may be sentient could suffer harm due to precedents set today regarding behaviors toward their non-sentient predecessors. The challenge emerges from our lack of philosophically uncontested criteria for sentience in a robot. We encounter the phenomenon of spillover, described by Robert Nozick as a situation in which members of one moral category are treated in ways appropriate to another. In the case of sex robots, spillover occurs when we treat robots that could be sentient in ways appropriate to robots that are certainly not sentient. Sex robots could cause harmful spillover.