American Blog

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Don’t be afraid. They’re here to help. And help they will, at first.

But then the accidents will begin to pile up.

The old man dropped down a flight of the stairs by the robot that’s supposed to be carefully, securely carrying him home. The old woman electrocuted in her tub while being washed by the BathBot. The BedBot who manoeuvres grandma into bed and instead of puffing the pillows, tries to hold pillows over grandma’s face. The child who doesn’t get to hear the BookBot reading Harry Potter, but instead is instructed on how and why mummy must be killed, immediately.

Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5m people in greying Japan by 2025, a thinktank says, helping to avert worker shortages as the country’s population shrinks.

Japan faces a 16 per cent slide in the size of its workforce by 2030 while the number of elderly will mushroom, the Government estimates, raising worries about who will do the work in a country unused to, and unwilling to contemplate, large-scale immigration.

The thinktank, the Machine Industry Memorial Foundation, says robots could help fill the gaps, ranging from microsized capsules that detect lesions to high-tech vacuum cleaners.

Rather than each robot replacing one person, the foundation said in a report that robots could make time for people to focus on more important things.

Japan could save elderly insurance payments in 2025 by using robots that monitor the health of older people, so they don’t have to rely on human nursing care, the foundation said in its report.

Caregivers would save more than an hour a day if robots helped look after children, older people and did some housework, it added.

Robotic duties could include reading books out loud or helping bathe the elderly.

What if we make them too human in our attempts to make them less machine-like and instead of vacuuming and bathing grandma, they sit on the lounge and shrug “yeah, whatever” every time you voice command it to get its tractor treads off the coffee table and take out the goddamned garbage, just once without being asked three times to freaking do it.

Maybe that’s the secret of ensuring robots will never rise up and slaughter humankind : program their autonomous ‘minds’ to understand, appreciate and enjoy apathy.

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