During a discussion at the Web Summit technology conference in Dublin on Wednesday, Kathleen Richardson, senior research fellow in the ethics of robotics at the UK's De Montfort University, warned about the dangers of getting intimate with robots.
"It's something we should be very concerned about," she said, "because if people feel they can have an intimate relationship with a machine, that is saying something serious about how we're experiencing empathy with each other."
"You can't have sex with a machine like you do with a human being. We're losing our sense of humanity," she added.
Richardson launched the "campaign against sex robots" in the UK, and she is hoping that people will pay attention before the Second International Conference on Love and Sex with Robots takes place in Malaysia later this month.
Among the numerous companies developing sex robots is New Jersey-based True Companion, which has spent several years designing what it claims is the world's first sex robot – a life-sized rubber doll called "Roxxxy" that costs $7,000.
Nell Watson, a futurist at the Singularity University in Silicon Valley, welcomes the budding intimacy between machines and humans.
"We talk about the biggest killers in our society being things like heart disease," she said. "I actually wonder if one of the greatest killers of our age is loneliness. Now, machines can be a conduit towards not being so alone, towards getting some sort of emotional response, even if it's from a machine."
Jim Hunter, the chief scientist at Greenwave Systems, said robots can be used to help people who struggle to communicate or socialize.
"There's a lot of people who have challenges with regards to social interactions. And this provides them an opportunity… to actually share… at least some sort of interaction with something that they can have some sort of relationship with," he said.
Still, while he said robots could be used in a "specific therapeutic context," he also warned of the dangers of robots becoming substitutes for partners.
