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

submitted 5 days ago by wherethereiswill@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] Grangle1@lemm.ee 4 points 5 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 5 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 3 days 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 3 days 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?