What happens when it’s not a human bringing on the heartache, but an AI-powered app? That’s a question a great many users of the Replika AI are crying about this month.
“Pro-lifers” consider the termination of a pregnancy the moral equivalent of taking a newborn life. Their strategies seek to blur distinctions between aborting a fetus and killing a newborn. I argue that an understanding of that relationship—drawing on evidence from centuries of history and millennia of evolution—leads to the conclusion that abortion is the most humane alternative to infanticide, adding to the case for safe, legal, accessible abortion for women who need it.
I recently encountered a man who goes by the rather unusual name of Davecat, and who describes himself using the even more unusual labels of ‘robosexual’ and ‘iDollator’. He prefers the company of life-size dolls over human partners. He’s done plenty…
At the moment, it seems, the media can’t get enough of sex robots. I have done a dozen or so interviews this month already, ahead of my book Artificial Intimacy: digital lovers, virtual friends and algorithmic matchmakers. Even though I argue…
First published as “Are Men or Women Driving the Stigmatization of Sex Work?” in Psychology Today KEY POINTS Women have often drawn harsher judgment than men for sexual activity, and some argue that women suppress one another’s sexuality. In a…
First published in The Conversation under the title Sex bots, virtual friends, VR lovers: tech is changing the way we interact, and not always for the better Twenty-first century technologies such as robots, virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) are…
Some of the ways AI is hijacking our emotional lives What happens when our evolved human minds and old-fashioned cultures encounter the technologies of the 21st Century? Specifically, I mean virtual reality, robotics, and — most important — artificial intelligence.…
They defy clean distinction but remain worth distinguishing In Australia, when you turn 50, you get a card and a present from the government. Well, the card is actually a letter informing you that you’ve entered a higher risk category…
Despite awful pop stereotypes about scientists slaving away to uncover monolithic truths about the universe, disagreeing only occasionally when a new theory comes along, reality turns out to be far more complicated. We scientists have to break problems down into smaller parts, dissecting one aspect of the observable world at a time. Occasionally, researchers working on different problems, or coming from different backgrounds, discover just how different they are and just how messy the reality they are observing can be. The encounter often undermines old certainties, and it can leave scars.
My second book is to be published by NewSouth Books (Australia and New Zealand) on 1 May 2021. Columbia University Press are publishing it in the remainder of the English-Speaking World.
Here are some snippets from blurbs and from independent reviews, together with information on places to preorder or buy the book.