China orders trial of aged care robots that can cook, clean, and provide emotional support China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has ordered extensive trials of intelligent aged care robots. The Ministry’s announcement notes that China’s population is ageing, and families are therefore increasingly called on to care for their elders due to a shortage of aged care workers. Beijing wants to know if …
A hunk of metal and plastic is supposed to be able to provide emotional support ?
I'm absolutely not surprised that Elon Musk is going along with this. Actually, I would have thought Zuckerberg would have been first in line.
But the day some mechanical contraption is supposed to be my emotional support is the day I'm asking Dirty Harry to put me out of my misery.
"But the day some mechanical contraption is supposed to be my emotional support is the day I'm asking Dirty Harry to put me out of my misery."
I'm guessing ti have one's own arse wiped for you is bad enough, not sure there's much to choose between a robot or a demotivated minimum wage agency worker?
When my mother had delirium at home she no longer recognised her human carers and was screaming out of the window that there were burglars in her house. When she had delirium in hospital, she was convinced all the machinery and equipment was moving towards her and started throwing things to fend them off. Now she's in a care home, there is immense complexity in dressing her without casuing immense pain in her arthritic joints and she needs to be hoisted sympathetically from bed to chair and helped to eat. I'd like to see a robot deal with any of that without causing further terror and injury.
The things that do seem to give her some emotional support are toys - stuffed animals and dolls. The entirely passive ones seem to work as well as those that move or make noises.
None of the elderly and dementing residents has much of a life - but that's partly because they get little enough human attention as it is. Their lives are not going to be improved by having even less.
You're demonstrating a very common complete lack of understanding both of the current state of robotics and of the needs of elderly humans. For the record then, yes indeed robots even if not humanoid can provide great emotional support for several reasons. Firstly they can be designed specifically for that purpose and yes, we humans do know how to do that. It can involve everything from body language to gestures, physical contact (such as a hand on the shoulder or over the other's hand, a stroke of the head, a hug...), and appropriate language in appropriate voice modes.
Secondly many elderly people are not prejudiced against robotic assistance in the way that many younger people are, simply because the elderly are often more open-minded.
Thirdly something you're not realising is that there are considerable numbers of situations in which an elderly person actually _prefers_ non-human assistance because they worry about their frail old body being _judged_ by a human while they know full well that a machine will not do that, _cannot_ do that.
When I was interviewing people in their eighties and nineties, and a couple of centenarians, about this very topic—robotic help—they said they would prefer a non-human to assist them in anything involving their nakedness or vulnerability, such as dressing, bathing and toiletting, for this very reason.
And lastly robots will never respond defensively or with anger when a dementia sufferer spits or urinates on them or slaps, punches or kicks them, as many do. Humans are not so willing to take such abuse.
So please leave your prejudices out of this topic. If you're lucky enough to live long then you'll need help yourself one day.
> If you're lucky enough to live long then you'll need help yourself one day
Not really... my mother's specific terror was cancer, despite smoking 2-3 packs of cigarettes a day. She died of COPD.
Mine is dementia. To me, losing myself slowly like that is a horror beyond horrors. I've read Rob Wilkin's bio of Terry Pratchett and his last days. I've also listened to Big Clive's video about trying to care for his mother, and tracking her when she wandered off.
To this end, I have a 9mm pistol in the safe specifically to cure my dementia, if required. Hopefully, I won't ever need it. Everyone in my family has lived to their 90s without dementia, so that's a positive.
"what if you forget about your grand plan"
A robot might be the solution here. Your electronic Jeeves would have a standing order to use the firearm for this designated purpose daily† at 4.30pm just after tiffin unless countermanded earlier in the day by you.
"Oh dear I have a memory problem."
"I am confident you won't after tea, sir."
† probably also include the precondition that life isn't already extinct otherwise there might not be much left to bury.
How long before the World catches up with Ray Bradbury (at least creaking memory cells tell me it was him) who, as aired in these very columns some considerable time ago, wrote decades ago of a Desperate Housewife who took on a tall handsome but wholly robotic butler and ended up doing what comes (cough! cough!) naturally. There was at least one other El Reg aficionado who remembered the tale.
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1. Your Plastic Pal™ becomes a 24/7 audio-visual spying device in the service of The State (and of any private parties who can compromise its security).
2. The robot's (fake) AI decides you are demented, and holds you prisoner in your residence. Nope, you can't go to the store to buy food. ("There eventually will be lemon-scented napkins." -- HHGTTG)
2a. There is absolutely nothing wrong with someone, demented or not, wandering, so long as it isn't into traffic and so long as they can find their way home. Nowadays, they have these things called "smartphones", equipped with GPS units and "apps" which can help people navigate their way around ... even back to their homes.
3. Combining items 1 & 2, The State can surreptituously imprison specially-selected people. Government Override: Robot 0010-43CD-DEAD-BEEF, Anti-Wander Mode ON. No jackbooted thugs making a midnight raid. It's just that Mr. Thompson was never seen again until the neighbors reported the smell and the ambulance crew took his (covered-up) emaciated remains away.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with someone, demented or not, wandering, so long as it isn't into traffic and so long as they can find their way home
There are levels of competence. There was a local news article recently about a woman with traumatic brain injury who "broke out" (open the window and removed a screen, it didn't have bars on the windows) of the care home she was a resident in over the winter. This wasn't learned by the staff until the morning, apparently they are supposed to do bed checks every couple hours during the night but the person doing overnight shifts had been marking them as done without doing them.
She walked 1 1/2 miles through snow, barefoot, in 22F/-6C weather to a highway where she got a ride from a passing truck. Her parents found her a few hundred miles away at a truck stop, and when she was examined they found signs of sexual abuse but no STIs.
Sounds like she's more than a little worse for the wear from her "wandering". Maybe someone like her could live independently if she had a home robot able to meet her care needs (obviously I know nothing about her so I don't know what those may be) which might try to talk her out of leaving in the middle of the night barefoot through the snow, and failing that could alert someone the moment she did so she wouldn't have got so far.
Yes there are plenty of abuses that could come from something like this. But same with smartphones, PCs, ring/nest cameras, smart TVs and other smart appliances, smart meters and on and on. I think we're already well past the tipping point where the tech many of us have in our lives would be sufficient to have us live like '1984' if we let our democracies become dictatorships.
We’ll have the choice to access the “Machine of eternal sunshine”
Think old school Photo Booth.
Pull the curtain, take a seat, feed in all your credit cards and IDs. *
Answer a few questions.
Record a final will.
Press the big red button.
Anaesthetic gas administered
(Floor opens up at random and drops you into a furnace)
* Final photo and soundtrack choices at extra cost.
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