Slashdot Mirror
'Call For a Ban On Child Sex Robots' (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a BBC report: There should be a ban on the import of sex robots designed to look like children, the author of a new report into the phenomenon has said. Prof Noel Sharkey said that society as a whole needed to consider the impact of all types of sex robots. His Foundation for Responsible Robotics has conducted a consultation on the issue. Only a handful of companies were currently making sex robots, said Prof Sharkey. But, he added, the upcoming robot revolution could change that. The report, Our sexual future with robots, was written to focus attention on an issue barely discussed at the moment, he said. The report acknowledged that finding out how many people actually owned such robots was difficult because the companies that made them did not release the numbers. But, said Prof Sharkey, it was time society woke up to a possible future where humans and robots had sex. "We do need policymakers to look at it and the general public to decide what is acceptable and permissible," he said. "We need to think as a society what we want to do about it. I don't know the answers -- I am just asking the questions."
There should be a ban on [,,,]
Almost any time someone says these words, the response should be "No, no there shouldn't." Look at how many shitty, obsolete laws are still on the books that don't reflect modern societal values (e.g. Chicken Tax, alimony) that are unlikely to get stricken despite that, even if they're still enforced. We should be loathe to put new, poorly-thought-out laws on the books that are premised on tenuous social values, given this fact. Next year's headline: "After new study, sex offenders leaving prison given mandatory sexbots."
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
You are going to hell if you have sex with your wife. According to the Catholics, the singular purpose of sex is procreation. Any other reason is a sin. You may as well turn gay.
Fortunately, we don't don't believe in mythical magical beings.
You don't make any sense. Why would someone who is already attracted to children start raping them if he masturbates with a robot? If he's not raping them before the robot is available to function as an outlet, why would he start after?
Given a choice I'm sure a pedophile would always try to have sex with a human child rather than a robot one. Because in the depths of their hearts they don't believe what they are doing is wrong. I don't think many actual pedophiles would use this type of technology. Nor do I think that this type of technology would encourage pedophilia any more than inflatable sheep encourage bestiality.
The thing is, they are not given a choice. Having sex with an actual child is illegal, in the hopes that the threat of jail will make more pick the alternatives over having sex with real children.
But as soon as they start picking the alternatives, we are very quick to make them illegal also. It's like we don't actually want them to pick the alternatives after all.
Recently I came upon a case that's even more absurd than that. In New York, a man was arrested for 'manufacture of child pornography', when he was already on supervision for the same charge. Must be some child abusing monster right? No, it turns out all this clown did (both the new and original charge) is cut children's faces out of catalogs and glue them on pictures of an adult pornstars body. Sick yeah, but illegal, nevermind the same charge as someone recording sex with a toddler? You've got to be kidding me.
There isn't much we can do about that, we can't change them.
Actually, there are some successful treatments. Not for all of them, and not like those "gay conversion camps". It's basically a form of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, where they learn to recognize the patterns of thought that lead them to sexualizing children and alter them.
Similar treatments are available for people with a sex/porn addiction, and related addictions like exercise. Those things are addictive because, like drugs, they make you feel good for a while and you start to crave that feeling. The only real difference with paedophiles is that it's much harder for them to get treatment, because few people are willing to go to their doctor and admit that they are attracted to children.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Can you give a general outline of how to make such study that can demonstrate causality and get past ethics committee?
Take 2 groups of Paedophiles post release from prison give one group access to the robots and measure the re-offending rates in both groups.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
gateway drugs are real - almost nobody start injecting heroin from day one.
Actually, it's been shown that social isolation is the trigger for drug addictions. That drug usage developed as a survival mechanism so that brains (not only human one) who would otherwise commit suicide remain active for as long as the condition of isolation remains, until the conditions causing their need are solved, at which point the addiction begins to recede.
The interesting part is that this applies even to heroin. Many people who get into intensive care while suffering from severe pain receive what amounts to "heroin with another name", sometimes for many months, as an analgesic. And the majority of those, when they leave the hospital and stop using the drug, suffer almost no physical withdrawal symptoms, and no psychological ones. The reason for that is that they have a full life to go back to: family, work, friends, sports, hobbies, church etc. As such, the addiction survival mechanism isn't active and no addiction happened.
Now, what happens with "gateway" drugs is that the person who doesn't have a full life to keep them addiction free remains in survival mode and needs more and more to keep active, and the brain dead solution of removing the drugs doesn't fix the causes of the issue, it only makes the person more and more and more miserable, until the person dies or suicides.
Here's the true solution to drug addiction then: care for these people. Care enough that their brains shut the addiction survival mechanism down. Once that's done addiction rates will begin doing down, until all that remains are the few people whose brains have a defective addiction survival mechanism that remains active despite the lack of the environmental triggers. Then treat those few people medically.
Focusing on the drugs themselves is thus treating the symptoms, and poorly, while ignoring the causes of the illness.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I'm sure that there is quite a bit of truth to this, but I don't think that you paint a complete picture. Those who receive heroin-like drugs in the hospital do have a much lower addiction rate but part of this may be due to the drugs binding with inflamed tissue rather than the brain. If we were to start giving the drugs to hospital patients without injuries that warranted it, we would likely see physical addiction in that group. And withdraw from heroin is quite brutal physically including leaking fluids from all orifices. Your point stands that these drugs can be used safely and I agree that addiction has a huge social component. But you are underestimating the physical effects of drugs like heroin.
And in the good ole USA it is always "Think of the Children!!
It should be "Think about the data". These child-sexbots are legal in Japan, and many psychologists there believe that they help pedos to avoid interactions with real children. But, so far there is no published data.
In a free society, anything should be legal by default, and the burden should be on the advocates of a ban to provide evidence of harm.
The moral panic in TFA is justified with some severe cognitive dissonance. It says adult sexboxs will cause "social isolation" as people use them as substitutes for interaction with other people ... yet child sexbots will do the exact opposite, and cause more interaction with children. That makes no sense.
I'm not sure where this idea that sexual preference is inherent and unchangeable comes from. Well, some preferences seem to be, like being straight or gay.
From what I can tell, all these notions of sexual orientation and gender identity essentialism seem to stem from a defensive posture taken by the queer community, one that (as a genderqueer and pansexual person myself) has always seemed to have really unfortunate implications to me. It seems like the "it's not a choice!" mantra stems from a reaction to people saying that queer people are making bad (immoral, etc) life choices. But if something isn't a choice, so goes the folk notion of moral responsibility at least, then you can't be blamed for it, so to escape those attacks people take up the position that there's no choice involved.
I've always thought that had the unfortunate implication of ceding the attacker's claims that there's something wrong with the behavior/feelings/etc in the first place, and just claiming "I can't help it!" But if (as in most cases of e.g. trans or gay people, not with pedophilia here) there's nothing wrong in the first place, then there's no "helping it" to be done at all. Do you like any weird foods that other people think are gross? Why do you like them? Is that a matter of free choice, nature, or nurture? (It's probably a complex mix of all of them but) it doesn't matter, so long as we're not talking about killing people to eat their brains or something, because even if everybody else thinks your preferences are disgusting, you don't have to justify them to anyone but yourself.
Could I possibly avoid being attracted to who I'm attracted to? Maybe, I don't know, it's probably a complicated and difficult question to answer, and outside of idle academic curiosity I don't want and don't need to bother trying to answer it because it doesn't matter, I don't have to avoid being attracted to who I'm attracted to, because there's nothing wrong with it.
Maybe with pedophiles it is more important to answer that question. Or maybe it's just enough to make sure they know how to control their actions in spite of their feelings, like everyone should be able to anyway. (Most men's sexual attraction to women doesn't compel them to rape them, even most men who aren't able to find consenting partners usually manage to just go without, however much it might pain them to do so.) Which highlights the other side of the unfortunate implications the "I don't have a choice!" plea has. If someone has some psychological compulsion to do something terrible, like the aforementioned brain-eating cannibalism, that doesn't get them off the hook for it. The just purpose of punishment is not to inflict suffering on people for their bad choices, it's to protect other people from their bad behavior, if possible by reforming the perpetrators not to attempt those behaviors again, and to making them alone bear the cost of those behaviors, and if the perpetrators suffering is a necessary side-effect of achieving those goals, then so be it. If something is truly not a choice, then inflicting suffering won't be effective at reform, but that doesn't mean you just let the perps go because they couldn't help it. You still need to make sure restitution is paid to their victims and future victims are protected. However you can manage to do that. It doesn't matter that inflicting suffering won't accomplish that because they don't have a choice; a just society still has to do something about it. If that means locking them up for the protection of others then it doesn't matter one way or another that they didn't have a choice, because it's not about beating them over the head for their bad choices, it's just about protecting other people.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I have a neighbor, whom I count as a real friend, who went to prison for sharing what was classified as child pornography. Specifically, he dated someone who was legally allowed to consent to sex, but images of her nude were illegal.
He went to prison and was then obligated to do a bunch of therapy, lest they return him to prison. What amuses me is that he is still with the same partner and they have kids together. There is, as near as I can tell, zero chance of him having sex with someone who is not legally able to consent.
Again, she was old enough to have sex but the pictures the two of them took together were illegal, as was his sharing of those pictures online - even though she also consented to that. She was either 16 or 17, if you're curious. Legal to sex, illegal to take pics...
Anyhow, CBT was a big part of his therapy. Though, according to him, they aimed more at the grooming stage. You have to convince you, them, and find the opportunity. (Most aren't people snatching kids off the street.) So, they have three, at least, barriers to cross and warning signs for all of them. They concentrated there instead of starting at the point of changing their attractions/deviations.
IIRC, it was headed by a lady who is now deceased but the had consistently lower than average rates of recidivism and there are people continuing her work. I want to say her name was Tracy Morgan- Stanley, but it wasn't my job to remember it, though I did do some research when I first learned that they were an offender.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You could use that same reasoning to suggest we not have laws prohibiting murder.
Yes and no, it really depends how you apply it. It's one thing to ban a physical item from existence or possession; it's an entirely different thing to ban a concept or action.
To best illustrate this, imagine someone unknowingly planting "you having killed your next door neighbor" in your backpack.
Can't imagine that, because "you having killed your next door neighbor" is an action and not something that can be slipped in among your belongings without your knowledge? It's certainly not something you could do without your knowledge. It's something you may do unintentionally, maybe even something you could be blackmailed or otherwise forced or tricked into doing, but you'd know if you did it.
There you have it.
You probably have child porn in your browser cache, whether you've browsed (regular) porn sites or not, put there alongside who knows what else as part of a malvertizing campaign. If you do, you almost certainly don't know it.
Likewise, imagine the number of shipments of seemingly innocuous cargo that likely contained booze the driver of the truck carrying the cargo didn't know about during the prohibition era. That's possession, that would have been a lengthy prison sentence for the driver, and he didn't even know he was hauling it.
It still happens with drugs today; yes, most people hauling bricks of weed in their trunk know it's there, but most truckers hauling bricks of weed (or whatever) hidden in TV boxes, alongside other TV boxes actually containing TVs, probably don't know it. They're still in possession and still on the hook if their truck gets searched, though.
That's the primary difference between banning physical items and banning actions and concepts. The mere concept of child sexual abuse is (rightly) banned, as is the act itself (again, rightly so). Possession of physical evidence that it happened (not evidence that you did it, just that it happened ever, at some point) is something completely different; it's something you could (and likely do) have in your possession right now, at this moment, without even knowing it.
Punishment for breaking the law in this country is supposed to be based on intent, and you can't intend to possess something you don't know you possess.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.