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passive_fist comments on Open thread, Sep. 28 - Oct. 4, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think you're overestimating the importance of sex in human relationships. I'm willing to bet that someone with no sexual history can do a good enough job of raising a baby and a child, especially if they were well nurtured themselves. I'm concerned about how they'd do with an adolescent who's interested in sex.
More generally, I believe that people who have a hard time getting started on sexual/romantic relationships have parents who didn't have a good relationship.
As for social change, I don't think forbidding IVF for virgins isn't going to solve anything. I think we have sufficient evidence that external control doesn't have good tools for getting people to have children or form families.
I believe we're looking at a bottleneck where only people who really want children are having children, and I don't know what the outcome will be.
If the human race went entirely non-sexual but still wanted children at a reasonable rate, I don't think it would be a disaster. I also don't think this is likely.
I find it plausible that at least some of the people who don't want sex have had a traumatic sexual history. I really can't say that the world is a worse place because such people don't have to have sex to have children.
The big advantage I can see for sex robots is that if they can compete successfully with low-end prostitutes, women and girls will be much less likely to be forced into prostitution.
Indeed, in the past this was the norm in many societies. Most women's very first sexual experience was with their husband and they often became pregnant after very little sexual activity. Aside from the comment made by that anonymous psychologist, I am not aware of anyone saying that women require sexual experience to raise children. The two concepts seem entirely unrelated.
Experience with other children (children of other people in the family, or even stranger's children) seems to be a far more relevant area of experience and, if anything, this is the area in which many women today lag behind their predecessors.
Not to mention - my impression is that upper-class families would often hire nannies and governesses to do much of their child-rearing, and that these were considered respectable positions for unmarried women.
I think the idea is that having had long-term relationships (which leads to sex in almost all cases) is an important developmental step in which you learn a lot of important interpersonal skills. I think that's true, and I think it's unwise to let people skip this developmental step and create a child to fill the resulting void of loneliness.