New Scientist.
A care bot’s deployment in the UK has come under fire, but I would have welcomed robotic help for my elderly mother, says author Paul Kitcatt
Franck Robichon/Epa/REX/Shutterstock
Would you let a robot care for an ageing parent?
That question occurred to me while I was feeding my mother her lunch in a care home, shortly before she died. It wasn’t so much that the care she was getting from humans was bad, but it was inconsistent, and insufficient.
You can do all the mental exercises possible, but what really keeps the brain sharp is the company of other people – preferably intelligent, interesting ones. The staff in care homes can’t provide enough of it because there aren’t enough of them. It’s not their fault. The cost of that type of care, the kind that might help keep dementia at bay, is prohibitive.
This got me speculating about the introduction of robots in such circumstances, which led me to write a novel about the rise of this technology in these settings.
The use of robots in care homes has been popular in Japan for years, often for social interaction. Now it looks like other countries are finally catching on. This week comes the news that Pepper, a companion robot made by SoftBank Robotics of Japan, is being tried out in the UK. Capable of reacting to human emotions, it is being deployed in Southend, a coastal town not far from London, reportedly the first time a UK council has tried using a robot in a care home.
Reaction has been mixed. Critics objected to spending money on Pepper on many grounds. One is that Pepper is rather a basic robot. But look at the first mobile phones, and see how far they have come.
Future upgrades
This technology will get better. Perhaps the next generation of such robots will provide basic medical care. After all, AI has proved better at diagnosis in some fields than human doctors, and surgeons accept that robots can outperform them at some operations. A steady, tireless but robotic hand making tiny stitches inside your body? Why not?
As I explored the idea of care robots for my novel, I looked even further forward, positing a human-like robot so realistic it was indistinguishable from us. This is where we are going. Pepper’s descendants will be thoroughly convincing synthetic humans. Of course, that kind of development would create bigger dilemmas that science is still grappling with. Could an artificial brain have consciousness? What are the possible implications of making an intelligence superior to ours? Those questions need addressing – getting it wrong may not end well for us.
For now though, the other major objection to the use of companion robots like Pepper is that it is a misguided attempt to patch up a fundamental problem in modern societies: that at a personal level we are failing to provide care to others, so are now delegating the job to AI.
There is some truth in that. We should care more than we do. Not just about the elderly, but also about each other, other life on Earth, the planet itself, everything. We have made a bad job of it, to the point where our own survival is in question, along with that of many other species.
On balance though, I can’t help wondering why anyone would object to a practical solution to the difficulty of providing enough care? If a robot like Pepper can help at all, surely it is an improvement.
So to answer my opening question, I would have welcomed a robotic carer for my elderly mother, alongside human care. My mother loved modern life, technology and innovation. She would have enjoyed meeting Pepper, and would have made it her business to outwit it.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2151595-good-news-a-robot-has-been-hired-to-care-for-our-old-folk/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS
