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A Queer Love Bot might be a naïve or ‘Pollyanna-ish’ vision for the future of sex bots. However, it is a vision that aims to take us beyond the imagery of the enslaved ‘female’ sex bot—an image that is disturbingly easier to grasp than that of an empowered, complex queer sex bot. It seems sad to accept that machines designed primarily to facilitate human pleasure and intimacy do not have democratic potential. And radical, sex positive potential. An understanding of bots as more than just passive objects of human desire might facilitate this thinking.

This does not, however, overcome ethical concerns. Manufacturers may never see potential profit in a queer bot. Even if they do, the manufacture of queer bots will not change the misogynist nature of the mainstream sex industry. Sex bots may still take forms that represent violent and morally indefensible sexual and gendered relations. However, this may not be the only destiny for sex bots. Bots do have potential to hack existing sexual and gender scripts through entwining subversive programming and non-normative (and changeable) bodily form with human action. Ethical responsibility for the trajectory of human/bot relations sits at all points of their creation and engagement with humans: it lies in the imagining of the social life of sex bots, it sits with manufacturers and salespeople, it develops with programmers and anti-programmers (the hackers and the radical tech outfits), and it continues with the human ‘users’. It is a complicated equation that requires a broad vision for the potential life of these technologies, both the frightening and the liberating.

Figure 1. My Queer Love Bot 2.0: Modular Edition Draft Prototype 2020