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Inside Japan's futuristic care homes where robots look after elderly (www.the-express.com)

submitted 3 days ago by wherethereiswill@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 16 points 3 days ago (5 children)

People who need care, because they have nobody anymore. Robots looking after them instead of humans. A dark kind of future.

[–] ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 3 days ago (1 children)

They should've thought of that before they stopped having children. /s

[–] BigLime@lemmy.ml 9 points 3 days ago

How can you be so wrong, yet so right?

[–] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 11 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Why's that dark? It's a free future. The young don't have to clean up after their elders anymore.

[–] GhiLA@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

You're right, but wrong about the robot. I'd rather kill myself than subject myself to Gen Alpha "care" if that's the form it takes.

I'd kick it over every now and again for fun to make a human get paid to pick it up.

[–] Grangle1@lemm.ee 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Personal human contact is still an important thing to have for one's mental health and wellbeing at any age, and that includes the elderly and the young interacting with each other You'd think that was an important societal lesson the isolated Covid years should have taught us. Do you not think that making robots do all the work of caring for the elderly at least gives off vibes of the young just tossing out the old? A robot can never provide the personal touch of care that a human can. When I get old the last thing I would want would be just to be sent to some "home" with my only contact being with machines and computers.

[–] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You are assuming that the current medical scene won't improve. It is very likely that we'll eliminate the "old person lying in bed, dying" visual altogether due advancements in the medical field (especially accelerated further by development in AI)
The "human touch" is not impossible to replicate for machines. You aren't seeing machines capable of that right now, because the field of personal care robots are in their absolute infancy. "The human touch" at the end of the day, is just warm, soft skin paired with a caring voice. We have already replicated the caring voice.
Elder care robots won't be cold, metal bodies going "Boop boop, shit in bed defected, Boop boop engaging cleanup procedure...". They would be really kind voices, soft hands with an experience of more than a thousand years of handling thousands of patients. They would never become impatient, they would never feel bad or disgusted.

Of course, advancements in this tech won't stop humans from caring for the elderly. You can still care for ur grandpa. However, ur grandpa won't die if u don't.

Here's the best case scenario - you can be with ur grandpa, chat, play video games, do fun stuff. When it's time to change the diaper, a professional robot trained for this very purpose does the job.

[–] eatthecake@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

"The human touch” at the end of the day, is just warm, soft skin paired with a caring voice. We have already replicated the caring voice.

Spoken like someone who plans to marry a sexbot.

[–] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee -1 points 1 day ago

Haha I don't think I would need to do that just yet. But now that you said it, perhaps a sexbot might have very interesting use cases for threesomes, eh?

[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 days ago

For most people it's a pretty dark present. I've seen enough elder care facilities to know that the "good" ones are super expensive and frankly people still aren't always treated that great. The "bad" ones (and this is most of them) are pretty damn awful. I have pretty strict language favoring death over these places in my living will for good reason. A robot that can offer consistent, non-biased, round the clock care would be a big win. Most of the people that work in these places are at or below poverty line and doing care tasks that are highly undesirable. They don't specifically higher assholes, but with this much home and life stressors people do not function at their best, and they will take this stress out on easy targets like the elderly. Freeing people up from routine care tasks should actually allow them to focus on more human and compassionate interactions with residents.

[–] FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago

I take it you're not planning on becoming a domiciliary nurse?

[–] phoneymouse@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Most of these robots are backed by humans working remotely

[–] NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

I bet they are already planning to eliminate them at some point.