Caregivers Aren't Human: How Far Away Are Robots From Caring for Us in Old Age?

Starting from the caregiving experience of a robotics company founder, the article breaks elder care down into three tasks of differing difficulty: physical labor, emotional labor, and cognitive labor. It points out that what robots currently do well—monitoring, reminders, and conversational companionship—belongs to the information world, whereas the physical labor people most hope to have replaced requires large amounts of real-world data on human bodies, force, and contact, which is the industry's biggest bottleneck.