https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1065135/japan-au...
> Why haven’t they taken off? The answer tells us something about the limitations of techno-solutionism and the urgent need to rethink our approach to care.
> Japan has been developing robots to care for older people for over two decades, with public and private investment accelerating markedly in the 2010s. By 2018, the national government alone had spent well in excess of $300 million funding research and development for such devices. At first glance, the reason for racing to roboticize care may seem obvious. Almost any news article, presentation, or academic paper on the subject is prefaced by an array of anxiety-inducing facts and figures about Japan’s aging population: birth rates are below replacement levels, the population has started to shrink, and though in 2000 there were about four working-age adults for every person over 65, by 2050 the two groups will be near parity. The number of older people requiring care is increasing rapidly, as is the cost of caring for them. At the same time, the already large shortage of care workers is expected to get much worse over the next decade. There’s little doubt that many people in Japan see robots as a way to fill in for these missing workers without paying higher wages or confronting difficult questions about importing cheap immigrant labor, which successive conservative Japanese governments have tried to curtail.
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> ...
> Care crises aren’t the natural or inevitable result of demographic aging. Instead, they are the result of specific political and economic choices.
> In short, the machines failed to save labor. The care robots themselves required care: they had to be moved around, maintained, cleaned, booted up, operated, repeatedly explained to residents, constantly monitored during use, and stored away afterwards. Indeed, a growing body of evidence from other studies is finding that robots tend to end up creating more work for caregivers.
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I want to say that the approach that they're looking to do with robots replacing humans rather than augmenting humans is an approach that is going to be problematic.
On top of this is the dignity angle. I suspect many would prefer to be capable of bathing and dressing themselves rather than needing to rely on a caregiver.
Refusing to automate the "human" parts of healthcare will do nothing but kill people due to delayed or expensive care. Imagine a world where everyone had a doctor with all current medical knowledge available 24/7!
However: seeing an "AI" (you think this will end with chatbots?) >>>>>>>>>> not seeing a real person
People talk about “moonshots” but the Apollo program was 4.4% of the federal budget in 1966 the modern equivalent would be ~200-300 Billion dollars per year. Not that Japan needs to invest that kind of money, but it shows how much it was prioritized.