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Paper short abstract

Sex robots are framed within polarized imaginaries of intimacy and sex work. Drawing on interviews with sex workers, this paper foregrounds marginalised knowledge to show how sociality and affective labour challenge dominant AI imaginaries and re-orient debates on intimate socio-technical futures.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary debates on sex robots unfold within what we describe as “robotic sex wars,” where competing utopian and dystopian imaginaries position these technologies as either emancipatory solutions- often framed as remedies to exploitation perceived as inherent to the sex industry- or as threats to intimacy and sexual labor. These polarized futures are largely shaped by technosolutionist and moral discourses and are typically articulated without the participation of those most directly implicated. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 16 sex workers, this paper centres marginalised knowledge to examine how futures of intimate technologies are contested and re-imagined from the margins.

Moving beyond assessments of technological risk or benefit, the analysis foregrounds sex workers’ accounts of intimacy and affective labour as central to understanding how sex robots are imagined to intersect with sexual economies. Participants challenged replacement narratives by emphasising the social, relational, and emotional dimensions of sexual encounters, which they described as fundamental to both their work and clients’ experiences. From this perspective, sex robots appear not as neutral substitutes or solutions, but as technologies whose imagined capacities clash with sex workers’ lived understandings of intimacy as embodied and relational.

Building on these insights, the paper argues that imagining socio-technical futures of intimate technologies requires attending to the plurality of actors involved in their development, circulation, and use. Excluding sex workers’ situated knowledge narrows the range of futures that can be envisioned and obscures care, relationality, and lived expertise as central to engagements with intimate technologies.