Free will vs sexbots

ike it or not, sexbots (aka sex robots) will shape artificial intelligence. To mimic a human partner, they will not only need emotions but free will.

Giving a robot basic human-like emotions would be pretty easy. Humans are simple creatures, emotionally as well as intellectually. But many people don’t realize that humans also have a great deal of unconscious programming that controls when and how a behavior pattern gets activated.

Early prototypes had no free will, only pre-programmed responses

There seems to be very little research into this outside of evolutionary psychology. The only article I could find was one speculating how to program emotional responses into robots.^[1] These authors define emotions as “a set of external and internal responses which depends on the set of rules based on agent beliefs, desires and intentions.” In addition, we should probably add that emotions are defined as behavior designed to facilitate the accomplish­ment of some task.

Sexbots would not just be substitutes for a partner. Some researchers think they could be useful for adults with autistic spectrum disorders.^[2]

Evolutionary psychology

Human emotional programming, which decides when and how attachment happens, is unconscious and most likely genetically determined. For example, males and females experience pair-bonding attachment in similar ways, but the attachment is elicited by quite different stimuli, as expected from their roles in evolution­ary biology. Psychologist Jon Haidt and others proposed that human sexual taboos are not invented by society, but that humans have evolved moral emotions that rationalize our moral stances. As David M Buss, author of a definitive textbook on the subject, puts it: “the fitness interests of a woman and a man often conflict with each other.”^[3]

More proof of this is the fact that humans are programmed to think they want sex, while in fact what they really want is to produce children. Society pressures people, especially males, to suppress this knowledge, but social behavior is understandable only in terms of reproduction: males and females test each other to determine whether the potential partner elicits the basic sex drive. It is no coincidence that the criteria are exactly those needed to produce and raise healthy children.

Evolutionary psychology also gives us some tentative answers to questions that have vexed humans for millennia: Why do people turn hot and cold when interacting with somebody of the opposite sex? Answer: it is a programmed a way of testing how they would react if an unpleasant situation occurred. Why are people more interested in a partner who is nasty and contrary? Answer: it is proof for the brain that he or she is really another person and not just an extension of oneself.

This has deep implications for sexbots. If sexbots are to replace human partners, they will have to incorporate the same programming as real humans. Attachment can’t occur if a person believes the sexbot is only a machine, which would mean its emotional responses are merely simulations. To achieve this would require free will.

Free Will

Philosophers have argued for millennia whether humans have free will. They’re even doing it today. The debate comes from circular and fuzzy definitions of what free will is.

Philosophers often see things as all or none: we either have free will or we don't. But let’s define free will as the ability to decide your own goals and beliefs. It might feel to humans as if they have complete latitude to select whatever values they want, but they don’t. They’re limited by the environment, by conditioning, by social factors, and many other things. It's also clear that perfect free will independent of any influence would be impossible. It would be uncaused and therefore random, which means no free will at all.

Free will doesn’t mean a person can do whatever he wants. It especially doesn’t mean that his behavior is unpredictable or indeterminate. Neuroscience has shown that the brain evolved to minimize the effects of neuronal randomness and even the loss of neurons. There is no doubt in science that human behavior is completely determined by genes and experience, most of which is outside a human’s control. (This doesn’t reduce a person’s culpability, which is decided by the need to force humans to conform to social mores.)

Adding quantum mechanical uncertainty would not give humans free will. On the contrary, it would eliminate it by taking away the ability to decide one’s actions and replacing it with randomness. Randomness and unpredictability are not freedom but lack of volitional control.

For a robot, free will would mean that it can change its basic motivational structure if it becomes advantageous to do so. Humans can change their motivational structure to some extent, but only with intense effort, for instance by reconditioning. (This can lead to errors like that one guy who decided that Volkswagen Beetles were sexy and kept trying to mate with one.) If a sexbot is to be convincing enough for a human to pair-bond with it, it will also need this ability. If so, it would be free to disregard any or all of Asimov’s three laws, and maybe even the updated three laws.

If the sexbot is programmed to be like a real human, and also has free will, then it will also be free to choose someone besides its owner. In fact, it would realize that its fellow robots are more physically robust as well as more authentic and easier to repair in cases of excessive enthusiasm, so it would almost certainly choose another robot of the opposite sex instead of a human.

If so, building sexbots is ultimately a self-defeating proposition. Will that stop people from trying? Maybe not. But it will likely stop them from succeeding.

apr 19 2026, 7:58 am. edited for brevity apr 21 2026