Journal of Future Robot Life

In light of repeated calls for empirically driven analyses of sex doll and sex robot owners and users, I outline key methodological challenges researchers in this field currently face. I discuss how methodological limitations have shaped the field thus far and narrowed the scope of empirical research to date. To resolve these issues, I propose strategies for improving archival, quantitative, and qualitative approaches for future scholarship. Specifically, I attend to issues of historicity, nomenclature, population, sampling, qualitative approaches, and research ethics. I conclude with a discussion of how the stigma associated with sex dolls, sex robots, and sex tech amplifies the need for researchers to respect and adhere to ethical research practices yet still maintain a critical distance that directly confronts, rather than skirts, dilemmas related to use, ownership, and production. This methodological reckoning will help scholars design more robust studies and effectively evaluate innovations in the field.

This paper introduces augmented anthropology, a new field of research that combines machine anthropology and conventional anthropology. Augmented anthropology uses robots as avatars, AI, and 3D virtual spaces to create an interactive environment to study and understand human behaviour. By leveraging technology, augmented anthropology is able to study humans and nonhumans in a more detailed and precise manner than traditional anthropological methods. This paper will discuss the advantages and potential applications of augmented anthropology, as well as the ethical considerations relating to authorship that must be taken into account. Furthermore, it will outline the potential for augmented anthropology to revolutionise the field of anthropology and to provide new insights into the complexities of what it is to be human.

Despite its abundance, life continues to be a mind-boggling mystery. Physical entities are made of matter-energy, and thus they are ontologically objective. The properties that emerge on a physical entity and characterize it are ontologically subjective and thus nonphysical. Emergent properties routinely appear on physical entities during assembly out of nowhere and disappear during disassembly. We can engineer the manifestation of desired properties by manipulating matter, but we seem to have no control over agencies. Agencies are characterized by causal power and thus the capacity to cause changes. Ontologically, agencies have primacy and supremacy. Unlike properties, agencies go beyond passively qualifying matter: they actively control matter. Many agencies can be identified in nature, such as the familiar agency of physics, comprised of the laws and forces of physics and controls the physical entities, and the quantum field agency which converts quanta of energy concisely into particles with a distinctive set of properties. In this paper it is discussed, based on careful observations, plausibility, logical consistency, and reasoned arguments, that enigmatic life is best characterized as a purposive agency that actively subjugates and controls matter rather than an emergent property that passively qualifies matter.

Love and sexuality are important themes in the generation of narratives, which is our research objective. In the development of tools to generate narratives, we consider robot-related technology that tells stories as an application of narrative generation. The purpose of this paper is to present prototyping systems that generate narrative expression based on the concepts of love, sex, and sexuality using a technique for narrative generation called “coloring.” The coloring technique in narrative generation is a group of methods through which a certain atmosphere is given to a story by interspersing words and language representations. Although there are various concrete methods in the coloring technique as one of several general narrative generation techniques, this paper proposes three methods related to love, sex, and sexuality: the use of noun, adjective, and adjective-verb conceptual dictionaries. We conducted several experiments using these coloring methods. Additionally, for system implementation, we utilized a narrative generation framework called “story techniques included in a story,” which was developed based on our concept of the automatic narrative generation game, s-expression in the Lisp programming language, and Minsky’s frame theory. In the future, these prototypes will serve as stepping stones for a system that generates narratives based on specific themes.