Legal and Moral Implications of Child Sex Robots

Abstract

At a robotics conference in July 2014, Ronald Arkin, Mobile Robot Lab director at the Georgia Institute of Technology, claimed that robots designed to look and act like children could be used to treat pedophiles the way methadone is used to treat drug addicts. This claim gave rise to a heated debate. While some people think that the development of child sex robots in order to treat pedophiles would be a worthwhile project, others say this is a repugnant idea.1 The aforementioned debate is similar to the debate that raged when Dutch psychologists suggested that pedophiles should be offered entirely computer-generated child pornography for treatment purposes.2