Impact case study database

Richardson’s work is a critical study of robots and AI as ‘relational others’. For over 20 years, Richardson has charted the rise of new fields of social, therapeutic and sex robots. Advocates propose that robots are capable of substituting interpersonal relationships: friend, companion, therapist and female lover. Richardson’s work argues that this promotes a harmful culture, where relationships are devalued, and women become reducible to the role they play in male sexual gratification rather than as human beings with equal status. Richardson’s work is among the first of its kind to examine social robots through the prism of attachment studies. Richardson’s book Challenging Sociality [R1] laid out arguments for and against robots as therapeutic aids for children with autism spectrum conditions, questioning theories that suggest these children lack empathy or connection to humans, preferring objects and abstract systems instead. Moreover, an autism and attachment studies approach to social robotics, with its understanding of child development, trauma, bonding, learning, emotion regulation and cognitive and linguistic development, does not support arguments for robots as substitute attachments. Rather, the science of attachment warns us against normalising robots (or other humanmade entities) as substitute ‘intimate attachment others’ [R2, R3].

This work laid the foundation for a critique of the harms of social robotics, and subsequently led into a feminist approach to sex robots that take the form of women, children and infants. The case against sex robots was outlined in the 2015 paper ‘The Asymmetrical “Relationship”: Parallels Between Prostitution and the Development of Sex Robots’ [R4], which showed how robots were promoted to men as substitutes for relationships with women, and modelled on a commercial transaction. Classical approaches to the sex industry see it as a ‘commercial exchange of services’ but survivor accounts and feminist research evidences it as a form of sex inequality that allows men who buy sex to respond to prostituted women without empathy. This absence of empathy is a problem for supporting healthy attachments and relationships between men and women, but its existence formed the basis of arguments for sex robots for men. To date, there are only a few examples of male sex robots.

Sex robots are an emerging technology but there are significant connections to sex dolls. First, hyperrealist female sex dolls have been around since the 1990s, and the dolls are the physical embodiment of sex robots. Statistically speaking, sex dolls are part of sexual fetish communities bought primarily by men. Doll users portray their interactions as ‘relationships’, behaviours replicated by sex robot users. In her book [R1], Richardson termed this as a ‘narcissistic relationship’. Moreover, Richardson’s work emphasises how sex inequality is the basis of female sexual objectification. This is translated into a wider cultural context shaping developments online and in robotics and AI, a significant proportion of which is illegal and includes prostitution and sex trafficking, child sexual exploitation, non-consenting or violent pornography, choking, revenge porn, upskirting, voyeurism, underage sexting, online grooming, and slave auctions. From this work, Richardson published paper R4 which also formed the basis for the Campaign Against Sex Robots (CASR) which was subsequently created in September 2015 and was met with a global debate, as described in section 4.

In further research, the 2016 paper ‘Sex Robot Matters: Slavery, the Prostituted, and the Rights of Machines’ [R5] outlined the first ethical framework against sex robots that is rooted in attachment studies (developed in R1, R2 and R3) and abolitionist feminism (developed from R4). This framework is underscored by an ethical commitment to women’s humanity, defence of mutual human relationship, and protection of children.