I am Professor of Ethics and Culture of Robots and AI at De Montfort University, Leicester. 

I consider the social, cultural, political, ethical, economic and anthropological aspects of technologies that are designed to mimic human beings including robots, AI, VR/XR/AR avatars, dolls.

I am committed to the political idea of robots as property, and see their use in society as a signal that loving relationships between people and care for other animals and the environment has been supplanted by property relations – the drive to turn every aspect of life into property.

Since studying robots in the early 2000s I have been interested in the relationship between people and things and sociality. What makes something social and do all entities have these capacities. I have explored these issues in relation to social robots, autism therapies, and VR/XR/AR.

My concerns about human replacement, and the objectification of women and girls led to the launch of the Campaign Against Sex Robots in 2015. I changed the name of the CASR to the Campaign Against Porn Robots as porn rest on the abuse of human beings and relational violence against women and girls. It is precisely what these robots and dolls represent, 3D pornography.

As an abolitionist my work has been to develop arguments against industries that provide abuse as forms of entertainment including porn and prostitution. My calls are not only for regulation, but abolition of systems that thrive on the Politics of Dissociation.

I am the author of An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines (2015), Challenging Sociality: An Anthropology of Autism, Attachment and Robots (2018). And Kathleen co-edited The Sexual Politics of Sex Dolls and Sex Robots (2022). 

I also work closely with technologists on developing ethical technologies and have been involved in several European funded projects to this effect. 

My latest book Sex Robots: The End of Love (2025) explores the political and ethical context for arguments in support of “sex” robots. I argue that the use of terms attributed to them like love and sex demonstrate how debased these concepts have become in wider society. I offer a new pronominal system for making sense of these entities organised around the I and we. I offer a new form of political ethical relations I call I-you attachment rooted in love, non-violence and mutuality.

A further theme in my work is the boundary between fact and fiction. This produces a culture where reality is tangential and in the eye of the beholder. Such political systems give rise to dissociative political practices such as queer/transgender theory of sex and gender. For not believing in gender ideology I have been punished with cancellations and other forms of academic and social exclusion. In 2023 the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropological Society cancelled several female academics from a panel “Let’s Talk About Sex Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology” hosted by the Heterodox Academy.

I am a vegan and campaign for the abolition of all animal abuse industries and practices.