The manufacture of humanoid robots with embedded artificial intelligence and for sexual purposes has generated some debates within bioethics, in which diverse competing views have been presented. Themes such as sexuality and its deviations, the objectification of women, the relational problems of contemporary life, loneliness, and even the reproductive future of the species constitute the arguments which have emerged in relation to this subject. Based on these themes, this article presents the current state of the use of female sex robots, (...) the bioethical problems that arise, and how bioethics could serve as a medium for both thinking about and resolving some of these challenges. (shrink)

Social robots and their interactions with children are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with the emergence of child-robot relationships as a likely result. However, adequate measurement instruments that tap into concepts associated with child-robot relationship formation are scarce. We aimed to develop three measures that can be used to assess children’s closeness to, trust in, and perceived social support from, a social robot. We established the validity and reliability of these measures among 87 Dutch children aged 7 to 11 years old. Because (...) of their shortness, the measures can efficiently be applied by scholars aiming to gain insight into the general process of child-robot relationship formation and its specific sub-processes, that is, the emergence of closeness, trust, and perceived social support. (shrink)

Social robots and their interactions with children are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with the emergence of child-robot relationships as a likely result. However, adequate measurement instruments that tap into concepts associated with child-robot relationship formation are scarce. We aimed to develop three measures that can be used to assess children’s closeness to, trust in, and perceived social support from, a social robot. We established the validity and reliability of these measures among 87 Dutch children aged 7 to 11 years old. Because (...) of their shortness, the measures can efficiently be applied by scholars aiming to gain insight into the general process of child-robot relationship formation and its specific sub-processes, that is, the emergence of closeness, trust, and perceived social support. (shrink)

In developing artificial intelligence (AI), researchers often benchmark against human performance as a measure of progress. Is this kind of comparison possible for moral cognition? Given that human moral judgment often hinges on intangible properties like “intention” which may have no natural analog in artificial agents, it may prove difficult to design a “like‐for‐like” comparison between the moral behavior of artificial and human agents. What would a measure of moral behavior for both humans and AI look like? We unravel the (...) complexity of this question by discussing examples within reinforcement learning and generative AI, and we examine how the puzzle of evaluating artificial agents' moral cognition remains open for further investigation within cognitive science. (shrink)

I describe a suite of reinforcement learning environments in which artificial agents learn to value and respond to moral content and contexts. I illustrate the core principles of the framework by characterizing one such environment, or “gridworld,” in which an agent learns to trade-off between monetary profit and fair dealing, as applied in a standard behavioral economic paradigm. I then highlight the core technical and philosophical advantages of the learning approach for modeling moral cognition, and for addressing the so-called value (...) alignment problem in AI. (shrink)

Sex robots are likely to play an important role in shaping public understandings of sex and of relations between the sexes in the future. This paper contributes to the larger project of understanding how they will do so by examining the ethics of the “rape” of robots. I argue that the design of realistic female robots that could explicitly refuse consent to sex in order to facilitate rape fantasy would be unethical because sex with robots in these circumstances is a (...) representation of the rape of a woman, which may increase the rate of rape, expresses disrespect for women, and demonstrates a significant character defect. Even when the intention is not to facilitate rape, the design of robots that can explicitly refuse consent is problematic due to the likelihood that some users will experiment with raping them. Designing robots that lack the capacity to explicitly refuse consent may be morally problematic depending on which of two accounts of the representational content of sex with realistic humanoid robots is correct. (shrink)