Sex with robots: A not-so-niche market for disabled and older persons

In this article, we present our experiences from research into the healthy ageing and well-being of older people and we report on our personal opinions of robots that may help the elderly to have sex and to cope with isolation and loneliness. However, and while there is a growing industry for sex robots and other sex toys and gadgets, there is also a growing concern about the ethics of such an industry. As is the case with pornography, the concept of sex robots may be criticized, yet it has deep roots in human civilization, with erotic depictions that date back to the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Ages. So the need for an artefact that would offer sexually relevant functionality is not new at all. But what might be new and worrying is the potential for using artificial intelligence in sex robots in ways that might cause a repositioning of our entire value system. Such a threat is not related to the proliferation of sex robots per se but to the use of robots in general and in a variety of other fields of application

Sustainable ICT equals not ICT for sustainability

In this opinion paper we promote the idea of an open dialogue to take place from within the Sustainable Futures journal that will offer the opportunity to a wide range of actors and stakeholders to present their ideas, concerns and worries on a variety of issues relevant and related to aspects of sustainability. Such an open-ended approach will help overcome opposing dynamics that currently cater for polarization and as a result to the segregation within the scientific community and the society at large. On the positive side, there is a wide spectrum of ambitious, game-changing and disruptive initiatives that can be taken from academia, from the industry, from the activists’ movements and the citizens at large, which will aim to increase our freedoms and not reduce them

Sex with robots: A not-so-niche market for disabled and older persons

In this article, we present our experiences from research into the healthy ageing and well-being of older people and we report on our personal opinions of robots that may help the elderly to have sex and to cope with isolation and loneliness. However, and while there is a growing industry for sex robots and other sex toys and gadgets, there is also a growing concern about the ethics of such an industry. As is the case with pornography, the concept of sex robots may be criticized, yet it has deep roots in human civilization, with erotic depictions that date back to the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Ages. So the need for an artefact that would offer sexually relevant functionality is not new at all. But what might be new and worrying is the potential for using artificial intelligence in sex robots in ways that might cause a repositioning of our entire value system. Such a threat is not related to the proliferation of sex robots per se but to the use of robots in general and in a variety of other fields of application

Social robots skills learning from demonstration

In the paper we address the issue of deploying a learning-from-demonstration approach to acquire skills for carrying out conversational tasks with humans. The core idea is to have the robots exploit curated data resulting from human end-user training on dedicated simulators. This will be employed to train social skills in robots using AI models. The resulting social robot will incorporate the trained models