Beltane Early Growth Moon
Frank and Me is an engaging movie with a quick plot twist at the end that caught me napping, but the intriguing question raised is Frank’s relationship with the robot his son gives him to care for him.
Like most technophiles robots have been on my mind for a long time. Forbidden Planet came out, for example, in 1959 when I was 12. I read I Robot before that. At the time they seemed much more science fiction, probably only science fiction. In fact, it is very difficult to convey today the gap between many of those things we saw as science fiction and any reality we ever expected to experience. Space ships? With humans aboard? Moon landing? Video phone calls? Robots? Come on.
As a child of that era and a science fiction oriented one at that, imagine my delight when we land roving robots on Mars. Mars! Or, a human made machine leaves the solar system. The Oort Cloud! Calling my brother in Saudi Arabia and my sister in Singapore, with moving pictures and both of them on the screen with me at the same time. Get outta here.
When it comes to the question of how much care we can offer the elderly through robots, I’m jumping up and down. Let me at’em. I don’t want to plan robberies with one like Frank did, but I can easily imagine a relationship with a robot.
Some people, Frank Langella, lead actor in Frank and Me among them, think those kind of relationships should be with humans. A recent Wired article suggested that a fuzzy robot sold now as a companion for Alzheimer’s patients may work too well. People talk to it. They bemoan the relationship people might have with the robot.
Why? I mean, it’s not like we’re going to send people robots and then say, “Now, you have your robot. Let’s not ever hear from you again.” No, the robots will be part of a care-giving strategy. Perhaps they’ll do household tasks and some particular care-giving like medication administration. Perhaps they’ll be dialogical, with a capacity for learning and different accents.
We pay home health care aides around $20,000 a year. And there are fewer and fewer signing up for the jobs. It’s not hard to see why. This trend has accelerated just as the number of elders in our culture will increase enormously. I’m glad the Minnesota legislature voted to let child care workers and home health care workers organize. If they can get better pay, benefits and training, we’ll have more people wanting the work.
But my sense is that even if that sort of improvement changes their lot somewhat, it will still not be enough to meet the needs of people who. like myself, want to age in place. We can do it, but most of us will need help of some kind.
(Hector, a mobile assistive robot and smart home interface for the elderly. forbes magazine)
It seems to me that a joint work force of robots and better paid home health care aides is a big step toward solving the problem of affordable care for the rapidly increasing elderly population. And I will welcome it.
I think back to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. He suggested we were moving toward a High Tech, High Touch society. That is, the more technologically sophisticated we become, in the same proportion we become eager for human contact, need human contact.
Those who write about the elderly and robots always seem to paint things as either/or. Either we increase the number of in home health care workers or we use robots. No, we’ll do both. And we’ll love it.
I want mine for my 70th birthday.
