With our workshop series we want to get insights from experts, so we can create a first set of ethical guidelines for the development of sex robots. These guidelines we want to disseminate to personnel of adult education, sex robot manufacturers, politics and society. This workshop series – consisting of a total of four workshops – started with a virtual one.
After a little round of introduction and some warm-up questions, we started a brainstorming activity. The participants were encouraged to believe that they are sex robot manufacturers. They were asked two questions:
“How would you design/produce a sex robot?”
“And how would you do that from a feminist point of view?”
They had ten topics to choose from to answer these questions. For example, like Accountability, Transparency or Behavior. They were also given a hypothesis, which they should always relate to when answering the question. The hypothesis was:
“Humanoid, hypersexualized, female-appearing sex robots could lead to an increased objectification of female-identified people”.
The brainstorming was followed by an open discussion, which was very inspiring. In total we were super happy with the outcome of our first workshop!
The second was one virtual as well. It took place at the “7th International Congress of Love and Sex with Robots”. It’s THE conference of the year for our topic so it was a great pleasure for us to be part of it. Besides our workshop, our project manager @eva.gengler had a presentation followed by a Q&A session which was amazing!
https://www.lovewithrobots.com/
At this workshop the participants were encouraged to believe that they are a team of sex robot experts (which most of them are). They should – in theory – create a manual by answering a questionary about what is ethically acceptable about sex robots.
This activity was also followed by an open discussion. And again, the outcome and results were interesting and inspiring. We hope to be back next year at this conference!
#fembots #gendercriticalfeminism #womenintechnology #futuretechnology #womeninresearch #ethics #taboo