Valentine's Day Robots: Robot Emotions, Romance, and Sex - Fiction and Fact

Valentine’s Day is rapidly approaching, and love of all kinds is in the air! Check out my podcast on robots and romance: deconstructing emotions which goes over the role of emotions in AI robotics, then discusses books and movies on robots as ideal lovers - robosexuals, LGBTQ robot love, robots for booty calls, and robot-robot love. One of the funniest, and perhaps most accurate, books on robot love is the Made for Love, a Silicon Valley satire where a woman returns home to Florida to her widowed father and his sexbot. A tad awkward, right? It’s like Carl Hiasen or Tim Dorsey wrote robot science fiction! See my review with a discussion of the sexbot industry

But sex with robots is no laughing matter in real life- see my interview with Dr. Van Wynsberghe of the The Foundation for Responsible Robotics here. The FRR has been working to get governments to set policies— see their report Our Sexual Future with Robots. As a woman, I appreciate The Campaign Against Sex Robots which argues that acting out sexual fantasies with sexbots that would make even Takashi Kovacs in Altered Carbon blush have toxic gender, cultural, and mental health implications. Check out the great article on the legal status of sexbots in the US here.

Made for Love (2017): Silicon Valley, Roasted, with a side of Sexbots