Star date: 3rd September 2016

THE BONKING OF BOTS TAKES CENTRE STAGE AS WORLD EXPERTS COME TO SALFORD

Would you? Could you? These are some of the questions world experts will be discussing at the UNESCO conference, Technology and Intimacy: Choice or Coercion, taking place at the University of Salford this week.

Dr David Kreps, of Salford University, says the conference will be pondering problems like "Can a robot ever create the same level of intimacy and connection that we get with another person?" or whether sex with robots should be banned.

Full details here...

The incredibly popular Channel 4 series, Humans, which returns this autumn for its second series, showed a not too distant future where people were turned on to over realistic `synths', who shared, cared and, er, carnalised to everyone's taste – before the robots turned strange.

This week, starting Wednesday September 7th, the University of Salford is hosting a three day major conference for UNESCO computing body IFIP that will discuss subjects like sex between robots and humans, as part of the bigger ethical issue of the state of Artificial Intelligence (AI)...

"We will be asking questions like how genuinely human can any robot ever be?"  explains conference organiser Dr David Kreps, of The University of Salford Business School "Can a robot ever create the same level of intimacy and connection that we get with another person? For example eye contact is an important aspect of human love and would be incredibly hard to replicate in a robot....Some of the best minds in computer ethics will be here discussing these issues."

Giving a keynote speech at the Human Choice and Computers conference - titled Technology and Intimacy: Choice or Coercion - is Professor Charles Ess from the University of Oslo, who will delving into the bonking of bots...

"Once the stuff of science fiction, the rapid development of AIs conjoined with social robots has evoked serious philosophical reflection over the past decade focusing on the realities and ethical dimensions of love and sex between humans and machines" he says 

"Representative positions are marked out by some optimism that we will fall in love with and marry social robots sometime in the not too distant future, versus others who think we should ban sex robots altogether" he adds "I will be trying to plot a middle path between those two positions."

Humans' sexy robot Anita, played by actress Gemma Chan, certainly got pulses racing in the last series of one of Channel 4's highest rated programme, but as the race to bring such technology forward moves into overdrive, Salford will be the centre of discussions about what happens next.

"There are all kinds of issues around consent, privacy and data protection when robots and artificial intelligence start to get more advanced" says Dr David Kreps "Many of these clever programmes only work because they have millions of people's details – Big Data as it's often known. How can we protect users?"

Er, by using a graphene condom?