- A new study from Finland suggests that people view sex with a robot more kindly than they view sex with a human prostitute.
- The effect is maintained even when the customer is married.
- While the exact causes of these opinions remain unknown, several proposals have been made. They may well serve as ethical guides going forward.
Robot sex dolls are a thing now. A proposed robot brothel in California is in the crowdfunding stage, Chinese scientists are pitching lifelike dolls as the solution for a society with a shockingly skewed gender ratio, and a TV show including sex robots as characters is watched by millions. Regrettably, philosophical investigation into the ethics around sex robots has not kept up with the tech or culture. A new study carried out in Finland may help to close the gap, though its findings raise as many questions as they answer.
The strangest study these people will ever be part of.
This photo taken on February 1, 2018 shows a worker trimming the skin imperfections of a silicone doll at a factory of EXDOLL, a firm based in the northeastern Chinese port city of Dalian. With China facing a massive gender gap and a greying population, a company wants to hook up lonely men and retirees with a new kind of companion: 'Smart' sex dolls that can talk, play music and turn on dishwashers
(FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images)
The study, to be presented at the International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots in Montana because we live in a world where that's a thing now, involved two experiments asking Finnish library patrons their opinions on the moral character of a person using a brothel either staffed by humans or robots in a short sci-fi story. The moral stances, sexual histories, level of disgust with pathogens, and familiarity with science fiction media were all recorded and used to analyze the subjects' answers.
The participants' moral stances were measured using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, created and made famous by Jonathan Haidt. It breaks moral psychology down into five foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Purity/Sanctity. The test asks questions designed to determine how relevant a foundation is for a person when making a moral choice and then gives them statements related to each foundation for them to rank their agreement or disagreement with. You can take the same test yourself here.
The subjects were then randomly placed into one of four groups to read a vignette. Their story featured either a single or married man in 2035 visiting a brothel on a trip in Europe. The brothel either advertises "You cannot tell our robots from real women" or "All our workers are real women." The story ends with the man paying for "services" which were left to the reader's imagination.
The readers than expressed their opinion of the man by answering a series of questions. These questions focused on their opinion of his behavior, their opinion on his character, and their opinion of buying sexual services in general. The answers were then compared with the demographic data collected above.
What did they say about the man?
As you might expect, people viewed a married person who went to the brothel of any kind more harshly than a single person. However, people saw the act of sleeping with a robot as less objectionable than sleeping with a human for both single and married individuals.
Subjects with more sexual experience judged the act of going to a brothel less harshly overall. Female test subjects found the character to be more morally degraded than the male subjects did. The act of sleeping with a robot was condemned less than sleeping with a human, except by people with very high scores on the purity/sanctity spectrum.
A second, larger test was carried out with only one change; a scenario where the customer was a woman was added. The results were largely the same, although people saw what the female customer did as slightly worse than what a male one did.Why would we get these results?
The silhouettes of two teenage girls rescued from a cyber sex den. Could sex robots be the solution to such situations?
Photo: ED ALJIBE/AFP/Getty Images
The authors concluded that:
"Sex with a sex robot is seen to be closer to sex with another human than masturbation. Also, attitudes towards sex robots seem to be influenced by the same factors as attitudes towards robots in general. In summary, sex with a robot is considered to be sex and a sex robot is seen as a robot."
These findings are largely in line with a previous study carried out by Thomas Arnold of Tufts University, who interpreted his results by saying:
"Relationships seem to drive how people morally judge the use of sex robots… The more you start thinking about it as something that could compete against or interfere with your relationships, that seems to be what people morally object to."
He further explained to New Scientist that his study "found that most people thought of it more like masturbation or using a sex toy."
A relationship was found between how people scored on the pathogen disgust quiz and how much they objected to the character's actions, with people scoring lowest on that scale objecting more to a married person sleeping with a sexbot than those who got a high score. Highly germophobic people objected the most strongly to the idea of a married person paying for sexual services of any kind but especially disliked a married person paying for sex with a human being.
This suggests that while many people object to the idea of cheating no matter what the situation, at least some of this objection is based on the idea of the need to prevent "contamination" of the marital union. Given our common notion of robots as sleek and clean, it may be the case that the fear of disease isn't applied to them in the same way it is to a human sex worker. It also explains why they would be less concerned about a single person going to a brothel than they are for a married person.
"No judgment here," say sci-fi fans
Perhaps most surprisingly, the more familiar or involved people were with science fiction fandoms the more accepting they were of the idea of sex with robots. This correlation was so strong that it removed the gender difference in how the character was viewed. The authors of the study do not know if consuming science fiction work causes this acceptance, however, it is possible that people who are open to this idea could be the same people who are attracted to science-fiction.
What else don’t we know?
The study's authors were very clear that much more work is needed. They suggest that further studies should have test subjects more reflective of the entire population and from cultures that might have different attitudes towards robots than the Finns.
As sexual robots become ever more realistic and popular, we're going to have to have a clearer understanding of how we view them and what we consider our use of them to be. This study is far from definitive, but it does give us a point to start with.
- Robot sex dolls are becoming more popular, according to data - Big Think ›
- More men and women are likely to consider sex with a robot - Big Think ›
In recent years, our team at Iowa State University has found a way to make pigs an even closer stand-in for humans. We have successfully transferred components of the human immune system into pigs that lack a functional immune system. This breakthrough has the potential to accelerate medical research in many areas, including virus and vaccine research, as well as cancer and stem cell therapeutics.
Existing biomedical models
Severe Combined Immunodeficiency, or SCID, is a genetic condition that causes impaired development of the immune system. People can develop SCID, as dramatized in the 1976 movie “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble." Other animals can develop SCID, too, including mice.
Researchers in the 1980s recognized that SCID mice could be implanted with human immune cells for further study. Such mice are called “humanized" mice and have been optimized over the past 30 years to study many questions relevant to human health.
Mice are the most commonly used animal in biomedical research, but results from mice often do not translate well to human responses, thanks to differences in metabolism, size and divergent cell functions compared with people.
Nonhuman primates are also used for medical research and are certainly closer stand-ins for humans. But using them for this purpose raises numerous ethical considerations. With these concerns in mind, the National Institutes of Health retired most of its chimpanzees from biomedical research in 2013.
Alternative animal models are in demand.
Swine are a viable option for medical research because of their similarities to humans. And with their widespread commercial use, pigs are met with fewer ethical dilemmas than primates. Upwards of 100 million hogs are slaughtered each year for food in the U.S.
Humanizing pigs
In 2012, groups at Iowa State University and Kansas State University, including Jack Dekkers, an expert in animal breeding and genetics, and Raymond Rowland, a specialist in animal diseases, serendipitously discovered a naturally occurring genetic mutation in pigs that caused SCID. We wondered if we could develop these pigs to create a new biomedical model.
Our group has worked for nearly a decade developing and optimizing SCID pigs for applications in biomedical research. In 2018, we achieved a twofold milestone when working with animal physiologist Jason Ross and his lab. Together we developed a more immunocompromised pig than the original SCID pig – and successfully humanized it, by transferring cultured human immune stem cells into the livers of developing piglets.
During early fetal development, immune cells develop within the liver, providing an opportunity to introduce human cells. We inject human immune stem cells into fetal pig livers using ultrasound imaging as a guide. As the pig fetus develops, the injected human immune stem cells begin to differentiate – or change into other kinds of cells – and spread through the pig's body. Once SCID piglets are born, we can detect human immune cells in their blood, liver, spleen and thymus gland. This humanization is what makes them so valuable for testing new medical treatments.
We have found that human ovarian tumors survive and grow in SCID pigs, giving us an opportunity to study ovarian cancer in a new way. Similarly, because human skin survives on SCID pigs, scientists may be able to develop new treatments for skin burns. Other research possibilities are numerous.
The ultraclean SCID pig biocontainment facility in Ames, Iowa. Adeline Boettcher, CC BY-SA
Pigs in a bubble
Since our pigs lack essential components of their immune system, they are extremely susceptible to infection and require special housing to help reduce exposure to pathogens.
SCID pigs are raised in bubble biocontainment facilities. Positive pressure rooms, which maintain a higher air pressure than the surrounding environment to keep pathogens out, are coupled with highly filtered air and water. All personnel are required to wear full personal protective equipment. We typically have anywhere from two to 15 SCID pigs and breeding animals at a given time. (Our breeding animals do not have SCID, but they are genetic carriers of the mutation, so their offspring may have SCID.)
As with any animal research, ethical considerations are always front and center. All our protocols are approved by Iowa State University's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and are in accordance with The National Institutes of Health's Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals.
Every day, twice a day, our pigs are checked by expert caretakers who monitor their health status and provide engagement. We have veterinarians on call. If any pigs fall ill, and drug or antibiotic intervention does not improve their condition, the animals are humanely euthanized.
Our goal is to continue optimizing our humanized SCID pigs so they can be more readily available for stem cell therapy testing, as well as research in other areas, including cancer. We hope the development of the SCID pig model will pave the way for advancements in therapeutic testing, with the long-term goal of improving human patient outcomes.
Adeline Boettcher earned her research-based Ph.D. working on the SCID project in 2019.
Christopher Tuggle, Professor of Animal Science, Iowa State University and Adeline Boettcher, Technical Writer II, Iowa State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Volcano erupting lava, volcanic sky active rock night Ecuador landscape
How can modern technology help warn us of impending volcanic eruptions?
One promising answer may lie in satellite imagery. In a recent study published in Nature Geoscience, researchers used infrared data collected by NASA satellites to study the conditions near volcanoes in the months and years before they erupted.
The results revealed a pattern: Prior to eruptions, an unusually large amount of heat had been escaping through soil near volcanoes. This diffusion of subterranean heat — which is a byproduct of "large-scale thermal unrest" — could potentially represent a warning sign of future eruptions.
For the study, the researchers conducted a statistical analysis of changes in surface temperature near volcanoes, using data collected over 16.5 years by NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. The results showed that eruptions tended to occur around the time when surface temperatures near the volcanoes peaked.
Eruptions were preceded by "subtle but significant long-term (years), large-scale (tens of square kilometres) increases in their radiant heat flux (up to ~1 °C in median radiant temperature)," the researchers wrote. After eruptions, surface temperatures reliably decreased, though the cool-down period took longer for bigger eruptions.
"Volcanoes can experience thermal unrest for several years before eruption," the researchers wrote. "This thermal unrest is dominated by a large-scale phenomenon operating over extensive areas of volcanic edifices, can be an early indicator of volcanic reactivation, can increase prior to different types of eruption and can be tracked through a statistical analysis of little-processed (that is, radiance or radiant temperature) satellite-based remote sensing data with high temporal resolution."
Although using satellites to monitor thermal unrest wouldn't enable scientists to make hyper-specific eruption predictions (like predicting the exact day), it could significantly improve prediction efforts. Seismologists and volcanologists currently use a range of techniques to forecast eruptions, including monitoring for gas emissions, ground deformation, and changes to nearby water channels, to name a few.
Still, none of these techniques have proven completely reliable, both because of the science and the practical barriers (e.g. funding) standing in the way of large-scale monitoring. In 2014, for example, Japan's Mount Ontake suddenly erupted, killing 63 people. It was the nation's deadliest eruption in nearly a century.
In the study, the researchers found that surface temperatures near Mount Ontake had been increasing in the two years prior to the eruption. To date, no other monitoring method has detected "well-defined" warning signs for the 2014 disaster, the researchers noted.
The researchers hope satellite-based infrared monitoring techniques, combined with existing methods, can improve prediction efforts for volcanic eruptions. Volcanic eruptions have killed about 2,000 people since 2000.
"Our findings can open new horizons to better constrain magma–hydrothermal interaction processes, especially when integrated with other datasets, allowing us to explore the thermal budget of volcanoes and anticipate eruptions that are very difficult to forecast through other geophysical/geochemical methods."
