Do we need care robots because we don’t have enough people to do the job?

Pressured health care

Ageing populations living longer put increasing pressure on health services in most developed countries, while in developing economies basic access to healthcare is the issue. What better solution to this problem than being able to ask Alexa about one’s health to avoid a visit to the doctor! What about care robots, automated image analysis, robot-aided surgery, online consultation and diagnosis and a host of other applications?

Paro the baby seal

Paro is a robot baby seal, much loved by many residents of care homes for dementia patients, where the same bonding that we noticed with children occurs. Those who have experienced caring for relatives afflicted by dementia will know how challenging it can be, so what could be wrong with the distraction and comfort that such robots can provide?

Heavy lifting

A robot can easily lift patients and transfer them to a wheelchair or change their position in bed. Even with simulated human characteristics, connections with real people and the empathy that they can provide is lost.

Love & compassion

Do we eventually become a less caring society by delivering functional rather than compassionate care? These are some of the questions that we need to be asking in the context of the sort of society that we want to see now and in the future. Clearly, an alter- native is to pay more for healthcare and to train and employ more people for service delivery. The real challenge for us here is what it does to love. Once again, we’re drawn back to that unique aspect of being made in the image of a loving God.

Transferring responsibility

what happens to us, what happens to our moral character and our virtues in a world where we increasingly have more and more opportunities to transfer our responsibilities for caring for others, to robots? And where the quality of those robots increasingly encourages us to feel more comfortable with doing this, to feel less guilty about it, to feelin fact maybe like that’s the best way that we can care for our loved ones?

Shannon Vallor Professor, Department of Philosophy, Santa Clara University

References

A. Johnston, Robotic Seals Comfort Dementia Patients but Raise Ethical Concerns, San Francisco: KALW [San Francisco Local Public Radio], 17 August 2015, retrieved on 11 September 2019 from .

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