Aimee Robbins-van Wynsberghe works at Delft University in the Netherlands as an Assistant Professor and is also Co-director of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics with an office in Hague. Aimee is also the ethics adviser for an industrial robots project on Robot Operating Systems and a member of MARIO Ethics & Privacy Supervisory board.

Last August Aimee gave an interview to the Quartz magazine, where she spoke about the future of relationships between humans and robots, which are ‘on the cusp of a sexual intimacy we may never reverse’. You can read the entire interview here.

It attracted our interest for several reasons: it is not only because the topic is controversial or what someone might describe as ‘catchy’; nor does this have to do with the argumentation line that Aimee takes and which is all worth to read and study as it doesn’t come from a ‘generalist’s perspective’ (Aimee is Professor of ethics – so definitely a specialist in this area). It is because there is a common denominator between our work in MARIO to address and make progress on the challenging problems of loneliness and isolation. Of course sex is not an answer to loneliness, but still the issues and the challenges are connected in many ways – so reading Aimee’s interview is a must read!