'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."

Comments

Re: There is much, much worse!

[alexgieg]

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.

Re: There is much, much worse!

[ShanghaiBill]

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.