Sex Robot Conference Cancelled Due To Protests Over Steve Bannon

A scholarly conference on “Love and Sex With Robots” scheduled to be held in Montana in December was cancelled this week due to protests over a planned speech by former Donald Trump “chief strategist” and editor of the alt-right news site Breitbart.com Steve Bannon, according to an account by The Independent newspaper.Bannon, 65, was a principal architect of Trump’s 2016 election victory, first as Breitbart editor steering the publication into becoming one of Trump’s earliest backers in the political media, and later as the CEO of Trump’s campaign, guiding Trump to his Electoral College victory. Bannon subsequently joined the Trump administration as “chief strategist,” until he was forced to resign in August of 2017 after several clashes with Trump.But Bannon has also become known, and notorious, for his open courting of extreme right-wing, racist white supremacist groups,  though he claimed that he was interested only in forming a coalition of groups, as Vanity Fair put it,  “united by their hatred of the establishment, whatever it was at any given moment.”Since departing the White House, Bannon has hit the lecture circuit, often drawing protests and triggering cancellations due to his far-right views, including at the New Yorker Festival, an annual literary and cultural event sponsored  by The New Yorker magazine. Bannon was set to headline the festival, but his participation was cancelled at the last minute after a public outcry, and when numerous other celebrities pulled out of the event in protest, according to The New York Times. Something similar appears to have taken place at the 15th International Conference of Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE), which was set to host the 4th International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots. The ACE had slated Bannon as its keynote speaker. But protests led to cancellation of the entire event—and the sex robot congress along with it, according to The Sun newspaper. â€œThe congress had been due to take place at the University of Montana in Missoula, alongside the 2018 Advances in Computing Entertainment Conference (ACE),” said an official statement from the sex robot event. “When it was announced that one of the keynote talks at ACE was to be given by Steve Bannon on the subject of employment opportunities for minorities in the computing entertainment industry, there were so many protests against Mr. Bannon participating in the ACE conference that it became necessary to cancel the 2018 ACE conference.”The “Love and Sex With Robots” congress is now scheduled to held in Las Vegas in 2020, concurrently with that year's AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, the current version of which is scheduled to open on January 23 of 2019.Photo By Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons