Unloading elderly care onto machines

Then the son pulls a large white humanoid robot from the trunk of his car.

Nick Bilton

In the opening scene of the movie Robot amp; Frank,which takes place in the near future,Frank,an older man who lives alone,is arguing with his son about going to a medical centre for Alzheimers treatment when the son interrupts him. I brought you something, he says to Frank. Then the son pulls a large white humanoid robot from the trunk of his car.

Frank watches in disbelief. You have got to be kidding me, he says as a robot helper,called the VGC-60L,stands in front of him. Im not this pathetic!

But as Frank soon learns,he doesnt have much of a choice. His new robot helper is there to cook,clean,garden and keep him company. His son,mired in family and work life,is too busy to care for his ailing father. There are two trends that are going in opposite directions. One is the increasing number of elderly people,and the other is the decline in the number of people to take care of them, said Jim Osborn,a roboticist and executive director of the Robotics Institutes Quality of Life Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Part of the view weve already espoused is that robots will start to fill in those gaps.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed Cody,a robotic nurse the university says is gentle enough to bathe elderly patients.

The technology is nearly there. But some researchers worry that we are not asking a fundamental question: Should we entrust the care of people in their 70s and older to artificial assistants rather than doing it ourselves?

Sherry Turkle,a professor of science,technology and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other,did a series of studies with Paro,a therapeutic robot that looks like a baby harp seal and is meant to have a calming effect on patients with dementia,Alzheimers and in health care facilities. The professor said she was troubled when she saw a 76-year-old woman share stories about her life with the robot. I felt like this isnt amazing; this is sad. We have been reduced to spectators of a conversation that has no meaning, she said. Turkle said robots did not have a capacity to listen or understand something personal,and tricking patients to think they can is unethical.

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Thats the catch. Leaving the questions of ethics aside for a moment,building robots is not simply about creating smart machines; it is about making something that is not human still appear,somehow,trustworthy.