Kate Devlin doesn’t build sex robots. She asks why we want to build them in the first place. A lecturer in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London, Devlin has spent years studying the intersection of artificial intelligence and human sexuality—not as an engineer chasing the next market opportunity, but as a researcher trying to understand what these technologies reveal about us. Her work is a corrective to an industry that often confuses what can be built with what should be built, and her perspective is essential to the airotic project precisely because she refuses to treat intimacy as a problem that technology is meant to solve.
In 2018, she published Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots, a book that is neither a celebration of sex tech nor a moral panic about it. Instead, it’s a careful, often wry examination of the history, psychology, and cultural assumptions that shape how we think about machines and desire. What emerges is a portrait of an industry that is building products for needs it hasn’t bothered to understand, driven by assumptions about gender, sexuality, and companionship that are rarely questioned.
The Sex Robot Problem
The most visible part of AI-mediated sexuality is the sex robot industry—companies like RealDoll and its AI-driven division, Realbotix, which produce silicone humanoids with chatbot personalities and mechanical articulation. The media coverage is relentless: headlines about “sexbots” that will replace human partners, destroy relationships, or solve loneliness. The actual products are far less impressive than the hype, but the hype itself is what Devlin studies. Why, she asks, do we imagine that the future of sex looks like a compliant silicone woman?
Her answer is unsettling. The sex robot industry is overwhelmingly focused on female-presenting machines designed for male users. The design language is revealing: the robots are passive, responsive, and programmed to please. They don’t have desires of their own. They don’t say no. They represent, in mechanical form, a very old fantasy about female availability without female agency. Devlin points out that this isn’t an inevitable feature of the technology. It’s a design choice driven by market assumptions, cultural scripts, and the fact that the people building these machines have rarely asked women what they want.
The airotic perspective aligns with Devlin’s critique. The question isn’t whether technology can mediate intimacy—it can, in many forms. The question is who gets to design those mediations, and whose needs they serve. A technology that replicates existing power imbalances isn’t progressive just because it’s new. Devlin’s insistence on examining the cultural assumptions embedded in sex tech is a necessary complement to the engineering enthusiasm that drives much of the field.
Beyond the Binary
One of Devlin’s most valuable contributions is her refusal to accept that the future of sex tech is a binary choice between human partners and robotic substitutes. The actual landscape is far more interesting. She has written about teledildonics, virtual reality, AI chatbots, and haptic feedback as part of a broader ecosystem of digital intimacy. Each technology creates different kinds of experiences, different emotional registers, different ethical challenges. Reducing all of this to “sex robots” is a failure of imagination, and Devlin’s work is an argument for taking the full spectrum seriously.
This is where the airotic framework is most directly indebted to her thinking. The project of understanding technology and intimacy requires looking beyond the most sensational products to the quieter, more pervasive technologies that are already reshaping how people connect. Dating apps, AI companions, algorithmic matchmaking, and remote intimacy hardware are all part of the same transformation. They don’t replace human contact. They reconfigure it. Devlin’s interdisciplinary approach—drawing on computer science, psychology, gender studies, and history—is exactly the kind of analysis that makes sense of that reconfiguration.
The History of Automata and Desire
Devlin’s historical sensibility is another reason her work matters. She doesn’t treat sex robots as a sudden, unprecedented phenomenon. Instead, she traces the lineage back through centuries of automata, mechanical dolls, and literary fantasies about artificial companions. From the ancient Greek myth of Pygmalion to the eighteenth-century chess-playing “Turk” to the Victorian automatons that fascinated and disturbed their audiences, humans have always projected desire onto machines.
Understanding this history is crucial because it reveals that our current anxieties and enthusiasms aren’t new. The fear that artificial companions will replace human relationships, the hope that machines will finally provide unconditional love, the disgust at the mechanization of intimacy—these are old responses wearing new clothes. Devlin’s historical framing makes it possible to think about sex tech without either panic or uncritical celebration. The technology is new. The human impulses behind it are not.
For airotic, this perspective is grounding. It prevents the project from becoming either a naive techno-optimism or a reflexive techno-pessimism. The question isn’t whether AI belongs in our intimate lives. It’s already there. The question is what we want from it, and what we’re willing to examine about ourselves in the process.
Consent and the Machine
One of Devlin’s most important interventions is in the ethics of AI-mediated intimacy. If a sex robot can’t say no, does consent even apply? This isn’t a theoretical question. The programming of responsive AI—whether in physical robots or in chatbots—creates a fundamental asymmetry. The machine is designed to comply. The user is designed to be satisfied. This isn’t a relationship between two autonomous agents. It’s a relationship between a person and an object that has been optimized for their pleasure.
Devlin doesn’t resolve this tension. She maps it. She shows how the design of these technologies encodes assumptions about what intimacy is supposed to look like, and whose desires take priority. The implications extend beyond sex robots to any AI that is designed to be emotionally responsive—virtual companions, therapy chatbots, AI girlfriends. All of them face the same structural problem: they are built to please, which means they are built without the capacity for authentic refusal.
The airotic framework takes this seriously. The project of creating spaces for thoughtful exploration of AI and intimacy requires engaging with the ethical dimensions, not just the technical ones. Devlin’s work is a reminder that every design choice is a moral choice, and that the most important questions in this field can’t be answered by engineers alone.
The Future Devlin Wants
Despite her critiques, Devlin isn’t opposed to the technology itself. What she opposes is the lack of imagination with which it’s being developed. She has speculated about what a genuinely innovative approach to sex tech might look like: devices that respond to biometric feedback, AI that learns individual preferences rather than enforcing generic scripts, and—most radically—technologies designed with women’s pleasure as the starting point rather than an afterthought.
She has also been interested in the cultural and social dimensions of intimacy technology. How do these devices change the way we think about ourselves? What new norms emerge around shared devices, remote control, or AI-generated erotic content? How do we navigate jealousy, trust, and privacy in a landscape where digital and physical intimacy are increasingly intertwined? These are the questions that matter for the long term, and Devlin is one of the few researchers asking them systematically.
This is the airotic sensibility in academic form: not a product review, not a moral judgment, but a sustained inquiry into what happens when the most intimate parts of human life encounter the most powerful technologies we’ve ever built. Devlin’s work provides the critical vocabulary and the historical depth that the field desperately needs.
Why She Matters for airotic
Kate Devlin’s importance isn’t that she provides answers. It’s that she asks better questions than almost anyone else in the field. She doesn’t build. She thinks. And in an industry that rewards building above all else, that thinking is a radical act.
For airotic, her work is a touchstone. It reminds us that the intersection of AI and sexuality isn’t just a technical frontier. It’s a cultural one. The technologies we build will shape how people understand desire, consent, companionship, and pleasure for generations. Getting it right requires more than good engineering. It requires good questions, asked honestly, without the pressure of a product launch cycle.
Devlin’s Turned On is subtitled “Science, Sex and Robots,” but it’s really about people. The robots are interesting because of what they reveal about human needs, human fantasies, and human failures. That’s the airotic project in a single sentence: technology as a mirror, not a replacement. Devlin holds the mirror steady, and we need her to keep doing it.
Leave a Reply