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Comment by moolcool | Hacker News Reader

> No-one said anything about automating any human connection

Maybe I was inferring the wrong thing, and if so I apologize, but the context of this comment was invoking LLMs and humanoid robots in a discussion about how "care doesn't scale". Like of course automation and technology should do things to make the lives of the elderly easier, but I would not classify any action done by a machine as "care". My dishwasher is a great convenience, but I would never classify my relationship with it as one of "caring".

> Knowing what her role as a carer has cost her in terms of quality of life, I would never want to subject my children to the same

Of course that's a problem. The answer though, IMO, is creating a society where we value elder care more, and have more programs to provide human support and connection to the elderly. I strongly feel like this isn't something which we can or should automate away.

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Perhaps it is a question of the different meanings the word care can take. Care in its normal everyday usage is indeed a natural human emotion, however this was not the subject of my post.

"Carers", are people who perform functions for people unable to do them themselves. Whether they "care" or not for their charges is not directly relevant (though often they are relatives, and certainly do care for, and love the people they are helping very much). Not always though - consider a "care home", which is essentially a dumping ground for the old and inconveniently frail. Having seen the inside of a few such places, I very much do not want to end up in one.

Enter the Robots, and technologies such as the LLM. In my imagination, a robot equipped with some facility with language, could act as an assistant for an elderly person, allowing them to maintain their independence for much longer without a human carer. This is not a replacement for human connection with their loved ones, but it is a replacement for putting them in a care home, or having ones own children spend part of their lives unable to have a job, or a normal social life, due to complex care requirements of some relative.

For what its worth, I doubt we disagree too much, I think it was a misunderstanding. However I'm interest to hear your thoughts.

> For what its worth, I doubt we disagree too much, I think it was a misunderstanding

I think so as well-- I'm glad you replied.

We certainly agree on the problem of bad care homes. We've all seen and heard the horror stories, and it's really unacceptable what's going on at a lot of these places. The question is, would unscrupulous care homes buy a robot and re-task workers with providing more social care to residents, or would they simply lay off the workers?

For a pretty large chunk of the population, care workers are the only source of regular human interactions. As such, I would make the argument that the necessity for these tasks to be completed by a human is, in many cases, a feature, not a bug.

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