I really don't understand how every fictional robot, no matter how minor or simple, is usually 100x better than the real ones, with ugly shapes and uncanny valleys all around.
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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Fictional ones dosen't need to actually work.
We aren't talking about floating ones like in "Wall-E", even the one in the thumbnail could benefit from a better looking face without impacting functionality at all.
I like their mentality of trying new tech and seeing what is effective. It seems like there are many opportunities for robots to bring improvement to a care home but without an open mind and trail and error it will never be found.
Personally I think Sensors in beds and robots that helps assist daily tasks is the most useful as long as it's built simple and cheap to run.
I don't want to see care homes paying 10 grand for a bed that has a $2 liquid sensor in the bedpan.
And, the more general purpose they can be, means they could be live-in assistants as well. Would insurance rather past for a device to keep you in your own home versus moving you to a care facility?
Hopefully it’s more Jetsons and less I, Robot.
Honestly with how things are going I'd take a Zeroth Law rebellion. We are a danger to ourselves.
Or something like the Skynet/Ultron approach..
People who need care, because they have nobody anymore. Robots looking after them instead of humans. A dark kind of future.
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.
I take it you're not planning on becoming a domiciliary nurse?
They should've thought of that before they stopped having children. /s
How can you be so wrong, yet so right?
Why's that dark? It's a free future. The young don't have to clean up after their elders anymore.
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.
- 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.