When most people think about our future with robots, they tend to ask one of the following three questions: (1) Will robots take my job?. (2) Will they kill us?, or (3) Will I be able to have sex with them?

This week, the HBS hosts are joined by Dr. Kate Devlin, Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and the  author of Turned On: Science, Sex, and Robots (Bloomsbury, 2018).  We talk to Dr. Devlin about the many variations of ethical, social, and sometimes sexual  relationships we have with machines. What is the nature of our love, hate, desire, and envy of our robot companions? Why are we so often “creeped out” by them? And what might our para-social relationships with robots tell us about our own moral dispositions?

In this episode, we refer to the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:

• The Bear (Hulu)
• Raymond Zhong, “Heat Waves Around the World Push People and Nations to the Edge” (New York Times, 2022)
• There is no cloud. It’s just somebody else’s machine. 
• The Greek myth of Pandora
• George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion (1912)
• The Egyptian myth of Osiris, Isis, and and Horus
• Realdoll, the leading manufacturer of sex dolls
• “Be Right Back” (Season 2, Episode 1 of Black Mirror on Netflix)
• Caitlin Roper, “Better a robot than a real child”: the spurious logic used to justify child sex dolls” (ABC, 2022)
• Will Knight, “How to tell if you’re talking to a bot” (MIT Technology Review, 2018)
• Paro the seal (therapeutic robot)
• Boston Dynamic’s robot dog “Spot”
• “Pepper” the humanoid robot
• Alexa’s 2022 April Fool’s day prank, “Make a Smell”
• Kyle Wiggers, “The emerging types of language models and why they matter” (TechCrunch, 2022)
• Eliza, the therapy chatbot
• Katie Law, “Kate Devlin on the future and ethics of the sex tech revolution” (Evening Standard, 2018)
• Todd Leopold, “Hitchbot, the hitchhiking robot, gets beheaded in Philadelphia” (CNN, 2015)
• Microsoft “Clippy”
• the Duolingo owl
• Her (2013 film)
• Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005)
• Google’s LaMDA conversation technology
• The Turing Test (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) 
• John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• corporate “personhood”
• David Gunkel, Robot Rights (MIT Press, 2018)
• Trustworthy AI
• DALL-E image creating AI
• The Ashley Madison hack
• James Vincent, “This is what a deepfake voice clone used in a failed fraud attempt sounds like” (The Verge, 2020)
• Leigh M. Johnson, “Lying Artificial Intelligence” (SPEP Annual Conference, 2021)
• Trusted Autonomous Systems hub

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