othing more than objects, with no moral weight. Thus, the issue of consent is a non-issue, but by considering them as ‘only’ objects, numerous other ethical concerns are raised. Within this section, I will focus concerns on the issues of objectification, and the uncertainty around at what point weak AI transitions to strong AI, to challenge the ‘intuitive’ solution.

Firstly, and of concern to many feminist theorists, is the problem that the trend of treating sex dolls with weak AI as objects encourages the corresponding treatment of women as objects. The sexual objectification of women has a complex relationship with the sex industry in feminist theory, with MacKinnon (2014:159) asserting that prostitution is fundamentally a power play, not merely the act of sex, but ‘you do what I say, sex’. Sex robots, frequently gender-coded as feminine, with a weak AI programmed to serve the sexual desires of others whilst mimicking the servile attitudes of an ‘ideal’ woman, only serve to reinforce this patriarchal narrative. This is particularly troublesome if one accepts a view like Satz’s (2010:136), who objects to both markets in women’s reproductive and sexual labour: ‘ on [their] relationship to the pervasive social inequality between men and women’. Without an obligation to respect the AI, which looks, sounds and acts like a ‘real’ woman, the narrative of women as sexually subservient to men not only goes unchallenged, but is exacerbated. This problem underpins many of the concerns around the development of sex robots, and it is one to which I will return later in the essay.

Moreover, there has been in recent years a transition in attitudes towards robots that does not seem reflective of this perception of them as objects. Notably, the EU recently passed a vote on whether robots should be accorded rights (Bulman, 2017) which affords them blame in situations where things go wrong under their control. In noting that robots are increasingly independent of their engineers and programmers (ibid., 2017), the vote echoes a further concern that would undermine the notion of weak AI as purely an object – that the line di