A robot carer? No thanks – we still need the human touch

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/sep/01/robot-carer-human-paro-seal

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“Guinea pigs, that’s what we are.”

“Unpaid, at that.”

Led predictably by Charlie and Joyce, we are indulging in a mass chuntering here in the community centre. It had kicked off harmlessly enough, with Cecil telling us about his daughter’s latest gadget, a hands-free vacuum cleaner that operated unsupervised, and parked itself on completing its task, while she was out walking the dog.

Related: How Paro the robot seal is being used to help UK dementia patients | Andrew Griffiths

Initially this was received with a mixture of shock and awe at its ingenuity. However a few anecdotes down the line, our encounters with contemporary technology confronted us with some seriously alarming possibilities. The custard really hit the fan when Molly mentioned Paro, the dementia seal.

“There’s 3,000 of them already.”

It was this which provoked our collective geriatric fury and so it should. One issue kept emerging – who asked for it? The world of robotics and artificial intelligence displays an indifference to client need that is glaringly apparent in the stuff being imposed on the helpless world of crumbliedom. Inventions owe everything to nerd appetite and nothing to user hunger. The creations of the Cog project, which is developing robotic aids for the elderly, may well become sufficiently sophisticated to make tea and beds, prepare meals and clothing, find lost keys and spectacles, dispense medication and advice, even wash dishes and personal orifices. That is not what we want.

It is not just the old who need support, nor is human care a geriatric preserve

Keeping warm, clean, fed, organised, alive, all take up more time than we would wish. They involve hard work and, often enough, pain. But as any elderly person will tell you, we can just about handle that. And we ought to.

Such tasks may remind us of what we no longer are but they also commemorate who we were. They may map our decline, but they also reprise our heydays. The process may be humbling, but it keeps us human, makes us stakeholders in the glorious fest of life. What we want is company, the human touch, the social connection.

Robots, even with smiley faces, can’t do that. In fact the smiley faces reveal the total lack of empathy which informs the people who designed them. There is something essentially masculine about the robot industry. You can almost hear the little grey cells at work as they tick off the “elderly needs” boxes and configure Robocare to respond appropriately. Men solve problems, practically and systematically. They hunt mammoths, kill dragons, change wheels. They are tool-users. They need an implement to engage. The robot is the ultimate tool, a connection which intervenes. It does the job; it does not fill the need.

So beware, young people. It is not just the old who need support, nor is human care a geriatric preserve. The removal of the human from the process may start with us crumblies but if technology becomes sole director of the script, there will be a robot for every human crisis, bereavement and birth, discomfort and celebration, loneliness and gratification – and work, with forecasts of 47% of US jobs being undertaken robotically within 50 years.

As historian Yuval Harari has observed in his book Sapiens, “the future of life is in the hands of a very small group of entrepreneurs”. The contemporary grey world is best placed to see the dangers, because we alone can offer an existential perspective. Left unregulated, technology will write humanity – and humane-ity – out and leave us as analogue refugees in a digital world directed by an elite of social and emotional illiterates.