Here Come the Robot Nurses
Publication/Creation Date
August 2 2021Description
This article focuses on the ethical and social implications of AI and humanoid robots for healthcare, such as Grace, the newest venture from a company called Awakening Health (a collaboration between Hanson Robotics and SingularityNET). Anna Romina Guevarra writes,
"The idea of coded care gives us a vocabulary for thinking about the potential harm of automating care work. Increasingly, using robots to automate care work is pitched as necessary to assist an aging population, minimize occupational hazards, relieve the burden on caregivers, and address the high turnover and burnout rate among caregivers. One study suggests that by 2030, there will be a shortage of 151,000 paid direct care workers and 3.8 million unpaid family caregivers. But given these concerns about coded care, whether robotic automation is the best way to address this shortage is debatable. Even assuming that empathy, emotional labor, and creativity can be mechanized anytime in the near future—which many roboticists doubt—outsourcing these kinds of care may have grave consequences for those receiving that care if racist and gendered biases in the code are not addressed."Keywords
Caregivers ,
Coded Care,
Work,
Labour,
Labour Justice,
Patients,
Medical,
Hospitals,
Aging,
Elderly,
Health,
Ethics,
Racism,
Gender,
Bias,
Discrimination,
COVID-19,
AutomationSource
http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/anna-romina-guevarra-here-come-robot-nurses
Date archived
August 2 2021Last edited
September 14 2021