This is great news for the future of the sex robot market, but when we’re talking about pedophiles, responsiveness is probably the last thing we want. When I told Gotch about this latest advancement in robotics, she balked.

“Now you have a child bot that’s indicating pleasure to these sexual activities? That could be very detrimental to the individual’s cognitive understanding.” The emergence of pedo-bots would likely reinforce pedophilic behaviors, sending the confusing message that sex with (robot) children is totally okay but sex with (human) children is not.

There’s also an important distinction to be made between pedophiles, or persons who have a known attraction to prepubescent children and child molesters, or persons who have actually molested children. In fact, a shockingly small number of pedophiles actually act on their impulses. So what happens when we build non-offending pedophiles a sex robot and encourage them to use it?