Technically shafted

Brexit starting to look as silly as sex with a robot WILDLIFE minister Therese Coffey wants to improve the status of bees”. How will she do that then? Award them MBeeEs?

THE Government’s proposed Data Ethics Commission will be the new regulator for artificial intelligence. They’ll have their hands full with sexbots.

As sex robots become more lifelike they raise a host of moral and social issues.

Four US companies now sell siliconeskinned sexbots with sensors to respond to touch and pre-programmed with emotions and personalities. For £11,600 you get the Harmony supermodel, which at that price must be the Kate Moss of bots.

A survey of 1,000 British adults last year found 26 per cent would ask a sexbot for a date. That’s seriously weird. Where would you take it? Perhaps a robot would enjoy a trip to London’s Science Museum, but would it offer to split the dinner bill afterwards? Should love blossom, could you have a church wedding? That should give the Church of England Synod the vapours for the next century. Once sexbots are programmed with feelings, the ticklish moral question the Data Ethics Commission might have to wrestle with is whether their consent is required for sex. Because they have no say in their human partner, it seems presumptuous and ill-mannered to assume you can have them scrubbed up with Duraglit and plunge wantonly into their circuitry without invitation. And what of the fate of EU sexbots after Brexit? Will they be allowed to stay if they’ve been settled here for five years? David Davis didn’t address robot rights when trying to persuade us to vote Leave last year – though Boris Johnson met some in Japan last week. The pair didn’t mention Euratom either, or that quitting the EU’s atomic energy community might jeopardise our supply of radioactive isotopes from Belgium and Holland, essential in cancer treatment. Nor did they raise the threat that leaving would pose to our nuclear industry and the possibility of power cuts. There’s so much we didn’t know, and are yet to find out, that our consent should be sought on a final Brexit deal. Which is why I’m increasingly coming round to a second referendum – once we know the terms. Brexiteers will say I’m nuts. But not as mad as the quarter of the populace willing to date a walking laptop.