Akintunde Agunbiade has posted Sex Robots: Ethical Issues Arising and their Potential Impact on Human Intimacy on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
As AI and robotics become more common in our everyday lives, they pose a challenge to long-settled definitions, principles, and concepts that govern our daily lives. Robots have been defined as 'force through intelligence' or 'where AI meets the real world'. Sex robots are a variant of social robots whose primary purpose is to provide sexual gratification and intimacy for humans. Sex robots come in different forms with unique functionalities, which are covered in this paper. Human intimacy in this paper focuses on heterosexual relationships, as this is what the use of sex robots is modelled after. In this paper, mention is made of robots that can refuse or simulate the rejection of sexual intimacy with the user. Several ethical dilemmas are also presented, which are by no means conclusive of all the various ways sex robots can be exploited or developed.