"And This, Kids, Is How I Met Your Mother": Consumerist, Mundane, and Uncanny Futures with Sex Robots

Video

DOI

Sex Robots are no longer science fiction and may soon be-come widespread. While much discussion has developed in academia on their moral and social impact, sex robots have yet to be examined from a critical design perspective and are under-explored in HCI. We use the Story Completion Method(SCM) to explore commonplace assumptions around futures with sex robots and discuss those from a critical design perspective. Thirty five participants completed a story stem of a human encountering a sex robot or vice-versa. Through thematic analysis, we show narratives of consumerist relation-ships between humans and sex robots, stories that describe sex robots as highly-efficient sex workers that (out)perform humans in routinal sex activities, and narratives that explore sex robots as empathetic and sentient beings. Our participant-created stories both reinforce and challenge established norms of sex robots and raise questions that concern responsible design and ethics in HCI. Finally, we show opportunities and limitations of using multiple-perspective story stems in SCM