Sex with robots
Chess master David Levy, the author of Love and Sex with Robots (2007) was interviewed by Scientific American in 2008. He saw a future in which humans will have relationships with humanoid machines, and thinks some people will prefer those relationships:
I don't think the advent of emotional and sexual relationships with robots will end or damage human–human relationships. People will still love people and have sex with people. But I think there are people who feel a void in their emotional and sex lives for any number of reasons who could benefit from robots. Other people might try out a relationship with a robot out of curiosity, or be fascinated by what's written in the media. And there are always people who want to keep up with the neighbors.
One point a friend made to me was that there will be people who say, "Oh, you're only a robot." But I also think there will be people who take the view, "Oh, you're only a human." (Levy 2009)
Those who see such a possibility not as a positive new option but as a frightening addition to the technological forces that are pushing us to dehumanization and disconnection from one another may raise many objections to this kind of attitude. Among them is even the question of whether it will be fair to treat such complex mechanisms as servants of our wills. But this sort of I, Robot question is not the chief concern the opponents of sex with robots tend to raise. Again, they revolve more around "the downfalls of gender." (Or rather the ways in which gender has not completely fallen down yet.)
They worry about some of the same things that trouble the critics of pornography, video games, and even much mainstream entertainment today: that by portraying certain people (women, members of other cultures, poor people) as subject to the desires of certain others we encourage those privileged people (mostly men in recent history) to look upon the others as subject to their wills and in some important sense not to be real, not to have feelings that need to be taken into account. If a man has a sex robot who "adores" him and does everything he wants it to (we'll leave aside for the moment whether this is even a very exciting prospect; it certainly doesn't seem like a very erotic one ), won't that lead him to treat real women - who look just like these robots - as though they too are just robots?
Nassau Hedron (2012) argues that the closer machines come to looking and seeming like humans, the more dehumanizing for us our treatment of them as machines will be: "even if something really is a mere machine and we therefore feel free to subject it to any desire we may have (however lofty or base) does giving ourselves that liberty potentially degrade or de-humanize us, especially if the machine is a reasonable facsimile of a human being?"
In particular, there seems to be a danger, at least in the short-term, of dehumanizing some of us. Because while there will undoubtedly be all sorts of sex robots, it seems clear that the biggest industry will be feminine robots for straight men to "have sex" with. This brings us back to the questions around pornography. Many people who have a problem with mainstream pornography feel that what makes it wrong is precisely this one-sided commodification, objectification, and instrumentalization of female sexuality for a male consumer. Sex with a fembot could be the ultimate de-realization of women's sexuality and humanity for the purpose of satsifying male fantasies. Such an eventuality would be the triumph of mechanization and could spell the death of the struggle for heterosexual intimacy and real connection between men and women, or indeed sexual intimacy of any kind, between anybody.
Worries such as these may be somewhat mired in a 20th century understanding of gender and sexuality that seems to be rapidly collapsing for many of us, but if porn and sex work are anything to go by there are still a lot of "very straight" ("super-straight"?) men in the world and a thriving market for various forms of objectified female sex service for them. I'm not sure how much interest there is in gay sex robots or lesbian robots or even male sex robots for straight women (though more about that in a moment!). The industry's focus is clearly on men who want to see female partners as appliances of a sort.