Automating Desire: Laws of sex robotics in the US and South Korea
Abstract: Oliver Wendall Holmes, the great American Supreme Court Jurist, famously asserted that basic principles do not get one very far. Legal disputes or thorny ethical challenges live betwixt and between competing and equally valid claims of rights and interests. What is needed in such scenarios is an ability to draw a line between them. “Automating Desire” adopts this legal realism by considering the legal and policy challenges introduced by the new industry of A.I. Sex Robotics. As opposed to an “ethics of” paper, or a basic principles argument, “Automating Desire” is an exercise in legal reasoning through case law as it relates to the legal framing of A.I. and desired policy outcomes in the sex industry. The emerging technology is creating new legal challenges—and not a few uncomfortable policy scenarios. The paper will proceed in three broad moves. Part One, “Obscene Desire,” will work through three American cases as it relates to import bans on the technology of child sex robots. In U.S. law, case law distinguishes between pornography and obscenity. Pornography, insofar as does not encroach the so-called “Miller Standard” of obscenity, is protected speech. Obscenity, which includes child pornography, is unprotected speech (Roth v. U.S.; and New York v. Ferber). With respect to child sex robots, there are three landmark cases to consider: Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition; Williams v. U.S.; and Miller v. California. What emerges from these cases are fundamental challenges of legal classification and the designation of real v. artificial. In the Supreme Court’s holding of U.S. v. Williams, for example, the court stated, leaning on Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, that child sex robots are protected speech insofar as the person who solicits the material reasonably believes the material involved does not involve real children. This section considers not only the legal framing of the matter, but takes seriously our intuitive sense of wrongdoing irrespective of the standard of real v. artificial in policy questions of therapy through legal philosopher, Joshua Kleinfeld’s rubric of “victimization” (2013). Part Two, “Governing Desire,” considers the South Korean court’s ban of imported sex robots on the grounds of what it deemed: threats to disrupt the constitutional order (Article 234 of their Customs Law). This ruling, I suggest, alerts us to the governing function of “Desire” on the one hand, and, on the other, the policy question of control: who gets to control what I desire. Part Three, “Automating Desire,” concludes by thinking prospectively from the edge of where law and policy currently stand on the question of sex robots. This section reflects on both the discomforts and pro-social applications of the technology of A.I. Sex Robotics.
Author bios: Michael J. Thate, Ph.D. is an Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer at Princeton University’s Faith & Work Initiative, SEAS, and the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education; and a Law Student at Northwestern Pritzker's School of Law.
He has held visiting fellowships and lectureships at Yale, Harvard, Durham University (U.K.), and l’École normale supérieure, Paris. He was a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Award, spending three years at Universität Tübingen in Germany. Michael’s academic interests are informed and complemented by his corporate consulting experience on matters relating to brand equity, communication strategy, and corporate trust.
Michael is the author of two monographs: Remembrance of Things Past? (Mohr Siebeck 2013) and The Godman and the Sea (UPenn Press, 2019). He has edited four other volumes and written several articles on subjects ranging from suicide, philosophy of religion, participation, labor, time, money, the second space age, the attention economy, design thinking, and business ethics. His work attempts to track genealogies of thought and set into comparison the assemblages of ethical questions. He is currently working on two books: Scented Life and Natural Prayers of the Soul. The former considers the ethical challenges of difference among and between lifeforms. The latter is an ethical reflection on the so-called attention economy.
Recorded Presentation | 26 April 2023
#SexRobots #Law #Policymakers #US #SouthKorea
