On Robot Sex (and other gender nuances)

Postcards from the Edge #2

We all know that men and women have their differences, but it turns out both do in fact want a clean house.

Beyond that small agreement, however, men and women hold very different opinions when it comes to the scenarios we presented in our recent AI Dis/comfort index.

The AI Dis/Comfort Index is the product of a 1200-person study conducted by Register Ventures that took a representative sample of the US population in which we gauged people’s level of comfort with various scenarios relating to use cases of AI. To look into the future without knowing exactly what it holds, we brainstormed a range of applications of AI from the factual (AI chatbots) to the far-fetched (Robot/AI Border Patrol), from the mundane (Robot/AI house cleaner), the mischievous (Robot/AI Sex Partner) to the outright macabre (uploading your brain before death so it could live on online).

We found that, despite their agreement on house cleaning, men and women viewed these scenarios from very different perspectives (see Figure 1 below).

Whilst overall acceptance was still low (only the top two scenarios had the majority accepting them), men’s acceptance of the AI scenarios that we presented exceeded women’s across the board. Men are significantly more likely to take the plunge into the world of autonomous vehicles and upload their brain. They also show significantly more interest in AI/Robot sex partners, at a staggering acceptance rate of 27% (rising to 44% among millennial men) compared to just 1 in 10 women.

Another large difference between the genders stemmed from opinions on the use of AI/Robot soldiers, with men being 16% more open to the idea (at 43%) than women (27%). This high level of comfort among men is particularly interesting in light of recent news involving both the US and Chinese military moving swiftly towards AI-powered tools in the military setting.

The largest difference between the genders, however, was found when we asked those surveyed whether they were comfortable with the concept of augmenting their body with AI/Robotic parts, a concept we dubbed the Cyborg/Human merger. On this point difference between men and women was 21%, meaning that men are 2.4 times more likely to be willing to amend their physiology mechanically to gain an advantage. This difference is especially interesting to consider in light of today’s era of physical alteration via plastic surgery and other procedures. Could men represent the future of such industries when cyborg enhancements become the new botox?

We also surveyed people’s beliefs around gender itself — is it fixed or is it fluid? Among those who believe it is fluid, the rate of comfort across every scenario we presented proved to be higher. Their comfort with riding in an autonomous vehicle with a human driver as a backup was remarkably high at 57%. A belief in gender fluidity across males and females also coincided with a rate of comfort with AI/Robot sex partners equal to that of males at 27%. This cohort leaned heavily liberal (65%) and also had a significantly lower belief in the existence of a God (67%) and a greater belief in the existence of aliens (55%) than either men or women on their own. While some levels of comfort were not dramatically different from those who view gender as fixed, it seems that a belief in gender beyond the binary coincides with a greater break from traditional beliefs in many senses and thus greater openness to what the future of AI and Robotics holds.

This post is #2 of 5 in a series of Postcards from the Edge based on the findings in our Dis/comfort Index, presented at TED 2019. In the days to come, we will publish additional postcards of our findings on various topics. Previous posts can be found here: Post 1.