Opinion: Robocare, anyone?
Care and companionship can now be assigned to Social Robots
By Pramod K Nayar
Paediatric, geriatric and other care robots are emerging as an alternative model of care services. In June 2021, the Journal of Pediatric Nursing concluded that “children benefited from robotic therapies and were responsive to the therapies and favoured robot’s presence since the robotic systems increased their attention and ability to participate in tasks”. The prestigious journal Pediatrics in 2019 wrote that care robots “address the emotional needs of hospitalized children, potentially increasing access to emotionally targeted interventions”.
Huggables are Here
In MIT’s Huggable Project, children in paediatric care were given social robots (The Huggable Bear) “to mitigate stress, anxiety and pain”. The robots engaged the children in playful interactions, offering “socio-emotional support”.
The age of Robocare has arrived in the form of Social Robots (SR), or as “Artificial Friends”, the term Kazuo Ishiguro employs in Klara and the Sun, to humans.
Klara’s commitment to Josie’s well-being surpasses, on occasion, even that of Josie’s mother. The child’s friendship with the Artificial Being, as in Josie’s with Klara’s, becomes real enough for the child to cope with her debilitating condition. It is an unusual friendship when Klara pronounces: “it’s now my duty to be Josie’s best friend”. Ishiguro gives enough clues so that we anticipate the friendship’s trajectory in certain ways. We imagine that one day Klara will not have Josie looking to her as a friend, for as the philosopher Jacques Derrida says:
“To have a friend, to look at him, to follow him with your eyes, to admire him in friendship, is to know in a more intense way, already injured, always insistent, and more and more unforgettable, that one of the two of you will inevitably see the other die. One of us, each says to himself, the day will come when one of the two of us will see himself no longer seeing the other…there is no friendship without this knowledge of finitude…”
Replacing Humans
Ishiguro was not inventing the scenario. In 2014 the New York Times carried Judith Newman’s essay, ‘To Siri with Love’, about an autistic child, Gus, whose conversations with Apple’s Siri produced a tremendous improvement in his communication skills.
Studies have shown that robots playing with children with Down’s syndrome, neurological gait disorders and autism spectrum disorders as a part of therapy has given positive results. Consistency and fewer confusing signals from the AI, these studies argue, enable such children to “befriend” the robot far more easily.
So, does the robot replace the human in such conditions as hospitalisation, extended care, pain management, and end-of-life care? Does the introduction of the robot produce massive shifts in social dynamics and human-human interactions?
Jason Borenstein, Director of the Graduate Research Ethics Program at Georgia Tech, and co-author of an essay on paediatric robots and ethics, argues: “if a child spends less time talking with doctors, nurses, or other care providers, it could be to the child’s detriment”. That is, the shift in the child’s social and interpersonal dynamics over a period of time could render the human support system redundant, the social consequences of which remain to be seen.
Fake Friends?
The Gus-Siri story had an interesting sidelight, and the conversation (recorded) went like this:
Gus: “Siri, will you marry me?”
Siri: “I’m not the marrying kind.”
Gus: “I mean, not now. I’m a kid. I mean when I’m grown up.”
Siri: “My end user agreement does not include marriage.”
Gus: “Oh, O.K.”
Did Gus assume the robot/AI was a “real” friend as opposed to a programmed “thing”? In Ishiguro, in response to Klara’s declaration of being Josie’s best friend, Josie says:
“You’re my Artificial Friend. That’s different”
And yet later, perhaps to assuage her own doubt, she asks Klara:
“So we’re friends, right? Best friends.”
Human beings have traditionally placed considerable value on the distinction between “true” and “fake” friends, writes the professor of philosophy, Alexis Elder, in an essay on AI. Friends, she writes, “jointly compose the friendship, and like many parts, their doing so can be understood in terms of their sustained interdependence and inter-responsiveness.”
In the case of “fake” friends, they “do not actually compose friendships with the deceived; they merely make the deceived think that they co-constitute a social group that does not in fact exist …”
If we adopt this reading of “friendship” then robots and AIs do not really “co-constitute a social group” with humans but it appears as if they do. That is, there is the appearance of a “sustained interdependence” that resembles usual human-human friendship, but actually is not. Hence, AIs cannot replace humans as friends to and with humans.
However, as Ishiguro implies, the now-on now-off friendship of two humans, Josie and Rick, is facilitated by the AI, Klara. For those children who are, for any kind of reason — from long-term illness, developmental disorders — unable to build human friendships, the AIs may actually help build their capacity for friendships. The child may choose the AI over other humans, but over time, through the interactions with the AI, become capable enough to bond with other humans.
To return to Elder:
“This is not an argument that people ought to be forced to have only human friends. Rather, it is an argument that in the course of developing people’s capacity to enjoy friendship, we ought not at the same time devalue the institution by potentially generating in patients the belief that therapeutic robots are their friends. Once these capacities are developed, or developed as well as can be done with appropriate methods, people can choose for themselves.”
The children could, then, choose robot friends over human ones or vice versa, once the capacities for friendship are fully developed. Thus, when the novel ends, Klara, her friendship no longer required by Josie, is dumped in a warehouse, with no friends, but in which she can still see a bit of the sun (don’t humans do that to other humans?)
The AI perhaps serves a pedagogic purpose in fitting the human better for human friendships, although the ethics of creating feeling “beings” (Klara expresses happiness and sadness) for such instrumental purposes is the subject for further exploration.
If Klara’s loyalty is the shape of things to come, Artificial Friends may be better than human friends.
(The author is Professor, Department of English, University of Hyderabad)
