Kate Devlin

Kate Devlin is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Having begun her career as an archaeologist before moving into computer science, Devlin’s research is in the fields of Human Computer Interaction (HCI and Artificial Intelligence (AI), investigating how people interact with and react to technology in order to understand how emerging and future technologies will affect us and the society in which we live.

A few years ago, Kate began to explore the particular ways in which sex, gender and sexuality might be incorporated into cognitive systems such as sexual companion robots; since then she has become a driving force in the field of intimacy and technology. In short, Kate has become the face of sex robots – quite literally in the case of one mis-captioned tabloid photograph. She has written articles on the subject for New Scientist, Prospect and i, appeared on BBC Radios 1–5, and made a number of TV appearances, along with TEDx talks and numerous other tech and philosophy events, receiving significant media coverage on the way. She was probably the first person to say ‘sex robots’ in the House of Lords – in an official capacity, at least.