Sex robot addiction warning as clinic reveals risk of humans getting HOOKED on dirty droids
MORE access to artificially intelligent sex robots could fuel a rise in sex addiction, warn psychology experts.
The controversial pleasure droids are being manufactured by a range of companies in the US and Japan, including Californian sex tech startup Realbotix, makers of the Harmony 3.0 superdoll.
These male and female bots are expected to sell for around £8,000 in the UK.
While their creators claim they can prove a boon for struggling marriages and lonely or disabled men, experts aren’t convinced about their benefits to society at large.
Psychological therapist Dr Thaddeus Birchard told that life-like robots featuring AI could be another outlet for sex addicts to express their compulsion.
Dr Birchard, who serves as the clinical director of the Marylebone Centre for Psychological Therapies, said they serve the same purpose as alcohol for people with drinking problems.
“It would just be another way of expressing sexual activity or addiction,” he explained.
“Sex addiction is a way to anaesthetise hard to bear feeling states…These include, but are not limited to, loneliness, shame, boredom, and stress.
“It has the same function as alcohol for problem drinkers…It is an escape from the self. This is the psychology behind it.”
The Marylebone Centre for Psychological Therapies describes sexual addiction as “sexual behaviours and thoughts that are difficult to stop”.
It adds: “sex is used like a drug to manage, often unconsciously, painful emotions and beliefs about oneself.
“Having a sexual addiction is not a choice…It is often a shameful, difficult, and lonely experience both for the individual and for their partners.”
Dr Birchard added that though he has yet to provide treatment for someone who used robots and dolls, the therapy methods would be the same as those offered to sex addicts.
“I would use the interventions that we use in working with anyone with a sexually compulsive behaviour,” he said.
But robotics expert Joe Snell has previously claimed that sex robots may become addictive as they provide a readily available outlet to “accommodate” people’s addictions
He cited the fact that you can program the droid’s to meet each individual owner’s sexual fantasies, making them even better at sex than humans.
On the flips side, Realbotix‘s founder and CEO Matt McMullen has cited replacing sex work with his firm’s bots as an ambition.
Meanwhile artificial intelligence expert Dr David Levy, author of Love and Sex with Robots, has also said androids will “significantly reduce the incidents of STIs”.
But leading medics recently rubbished those claims in a paper on the supposed arguments against and for the health benefits of sex robots.
Dr Chantal Cox-George, from St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and Professor Susan Bewley, from King’s College London, said there is little evidence on the potential benefits of the machines.
Writing in the BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health, they said: “It is speculative whether the development of a sexbot marketplace will lead to lesser risk of violence and infections, or drive further exploitation of human sex workers.
“The ‘health’ arguments made for their benefits, as with so many advertised products, are rather specious.”
They also raised fears that the droids could make sexual health issues (such as erectile dysfunction) worse and even spread STI epidemics.
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