Da man an ältere Eltern denken muss und die Bevölkerungsentwicklung darauf hindeutet, dass es nicht annähernd genug Betreuer geben wird, die ihnen helfen, frage ich mich, ob Roboter noch zu Lebzeiten eine nützliche Lösung sein könnten.
Niemand weiß das genau. Hier ist ein Artikel, in dem es um 15–20 Jahre geht:
https://www.rethinkx.com/blog/rethinkx/the-disruption-of-labour-by-humanoid-robots
Irgendwelche Meinungen dazu? Zu diesem Zeitpunkt noch nicht bekannt?
Humanoid robots: Guesstimate how many years until they can function as human caregivers for elderly and disabled
byu/OpE7 inFuturology
22 Comments
As a disabled person looking forward to it, my guesstimate fits the article.
(I mostly want a helper around the house that will carry breakable/fragile things and wash the windows and repair ceiling lights, i.e. do stuff I can’t do myself due to cerebral palsy)
15. There will be more limited early models before that. But 15 , maybe 20, before they can really do it.
I want to know how they will handle a combative patient covered in feces that screams and fights when they need to be cleaned?
I’m looking forward to it. I never liked the idea of a child needing to be the ultimate caregiver to the parent, especially if the parent did not or could not prepare for retirement. If you have the space, time, money, and patience to live your own life while also caring for your parent, then by all means, I’d do it too, but having done it I can say its way too difficult alone. 15-20 years sounds pretty accurate given with what we have now and the push for more
Do note that these robots don’t have to be humanoid to provide adequate care. A robot that can help people stand walk, move objects away so they dont trip over them, and handle deliveries would be some basics to start with, which I believe many should be capable of now, maybe not reliably, but once they can help bathe/clean people, cook food according to instruction, and generally take care of the house in ways such as throwing away garbage and washing dishes is what it could hopefully evolve into.
If it happens in that time, that’d be great. Id be in my 50s but that still gives a few more years of development so that when I’m in my 70s or older, It may be reasonable to expect an advanced robot like that, or something better. I think we really need to prioritize stuff like this. Getting old isn’t what sucks, its the lack of physical support and accessibility in ones own home that they’d need to be put into a facility if they have no where else to go that sucks. I don’t plan on having kids, so it’s either robots, I make/save a fuck ton of money to pay for home services, or I get put into a home or on the street.
as of next year, you’ll be able to buy droids basically that can come into your home and do certain tasks for you so probably a lot sooner than 15-20yrs
Not likely to advance rapidly due to the lack of money behind. Majority of boomers are retiring in near poverty and medicaid funded nursing homes operate on shoestring budgets. The field just doesn’t have the money driving rapid development. I would guess more like 50 years for droids that can provide hands on human care. The field will be driven by sex bots first then household task droids.
I’d agree with that time frame.
Honestly though more likely to happen in construction before that. Fault tolerance is much higher when the robot is working with inanimate materials vs someone’s parent or loved one.
the only reason we don’t have them now is because the people that bullied themselves into the positions that could build them, haven’t thought to build them because they have slaves all around them already so they don’t realize that everyone else wants them.
and… another reason for the assholes to not build them for the public is because it would be harder to control the public so why help the public get out of your control.
the only way were getting them is going to take a long time.
elon, is just spinning his wheels until someone else builds them then he will buy the company and say he invented it.
Many different levels of care, and many different tasks. Taking care of an Alzheimer patient is very different than taking care of someone who just can’t walk well but is mentally okay. So there won’t be one moment or time when it can all be done.
Probably something like this: personal non-humanoid robots doing simple tasks like checking on people, bring small stuff like medicine (already happening now). Then in 10 years semi-humanoid robots. With wheels and stuff still. This won’t be an issue in elderly houses and hospitals because most of the time they are already level. And after that real humanoid robots that can help dress someone.
What about humanoid robots operated remotely by the elderly and disabled through VR?
I would argue it depends on the task.
We already have technology that can keep track of medications and appointments for people as well as medical alert systems that can summon medical care in case of emergency. Systems to deliver medicine and prepared food already exist and will increasingly reduce the complexities of elderly/disabled care.
As far as feeding, dressing, helping to use the restroom, washing, cleaning up, doing laundry, etc, I’d say 15-20 years is possible, but probably a bit optimistic.
We have the prototype/early of the physical hardware that will allow us to do these things, but the software isn’t anywhere close to there, and even worse, the human trust in the machines that will help them do these intimate tasks needs to be built over a long period of time, and is likely a generational change.
The final issue is one that machines cannot provide as caregivers, at least in any near-future way, and that’s human connection. Old age and disability are very isolating things, and human minds deteriorate in isolation. Until machines can provide the same human connection as other people can, if that’s even possible, they will never be able to cross that final hurdle.
We will definitely see people able to live interdependently for far, far longer and under much more disabling circumstances than ever before, but the need for human carers will still be required for a very long time.
Depends entirely on how much or little the place cares.
6, at scale
1 in testing
It’s already in PoC in many spaces.
I think of robotics as a proxy for AI, as they are basically AI operating in everyday three-dimensional space. I suspect what you were talking about is sooner than many expect, perhaps here by the end of the decade.
[Unitree’s new G1 humanoid robot is priced at only $16,000, and looks like the type of humanoid robot that could sell in the tens of millions.](https://newatlas.com/robotics/unitree-g1-humanoid-agent/)
There are a huge number of people working on humanoid robots around the world, [here’s a YT video summarizing 37 different humanoid robots in development.](https://youtu.be/PyrDh6RQdYY)
a better option would be to ensure that people take care of themselves with better diets, exercise, mind building programming and interactive lives that would ensure better quality old age lives (over the age of 60 let’s say) so that there would be less need for caretakers.
Studies show that taking care of oneself at a young age (teens and up) will provide the basis for a healthy senior lifestyle. Maybe the genes are there for disease but the spark could be the lifestyle choices or other environmental issues.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3266548/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3266548/)
As a 30-something, realizing that I might be taken care of by robots…I really outta have some younger friends who have good work ethic & some money saved.
15-20 years is reasonable, but I think it’s conservative. Humanoid robots are advancing *fast* now, both in mechanical sophistication and in AI. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see them starting to serve as caregivers in 5 years or so.
Couple things:
There are enough people available to become caretakers for the elderly. One problem is that even if they are otherwise qualified, many men do not want to go into elder care. It is as a result, a profession with disproportionately more women than men. This is especially true in cultures that discourage men from pursuing caretaking roles for obvious reasons, such as Japan or Italy.
Since changing the minds of the people who live here is not possible and even if it were, it would take a while, a more viable solution is to open the borders to allow foreign women to come in to serve as caretakers for the elderly, the way the United States does with Jamaicans/Filipinos/Mexicans/etc.
But whoops, countries like also tend to be extremely racist and have been pushing even more as of late to close borders as their respective right-wing political groups scapegoat the political problems du jour on foreigners, like is happening in England, another place suffering from this problem.
As to the robots themselves, they exist now and are being used in certain places, like Japan, but they are broadly speaking not fully autonomous so still require human support staff. It’s more common for them to be piloted remotely by people who live in very poor countries so they can be paid less than the minimum wage in the country the elderly patient lives in, like those pizza delivery robots driven by an operator in Ecuador.
For the time being, foreign women are considerably cheaper than robots, so in terms of pure practicality, is a better solution even if you don’t care about obsoleting a large sector of the human workforce. While you don’t need to pay a robot anything in salary/insurance/etc, they still require expensive maintenance from specialized staff that is counteracts the theoretical cost savings. It’s the same as the McDonalds kiosks. You can place your order on them for sure but they can’t clean the bathrooms, restock the machines, take out the trash, clean the grease trap, etc. If you need human employees there for that reason anyway, then you may as well not bother adding a kiosk to your store as a franchisee.
Here’s a question:
Will AI speedrun robot technologies, and by how much?
I am willing to bet that by 2030, i will have a robot working for me that will be better than me. Technologies improve across the board nowadays and they are much more interconnected than the past. Thank the internet for that.
I follow a lot of the progress of AI and robotics online and I’m going to be optimistic and say we could have robotic caregivers within a decade. Elon Musk is hoping to start selling his Optimus bot as soon as next year, and while he is often overly optimistic, I still except it to come to market within the next few years. From there it’s just about making them more accessible and making improvements both to the software and hardware. Also, as they start to make their way into homes, they’ll learn from their experiences and all this information will be shared between all of the bots deployed.
Why does it have to be humanoid? There are already quadruped robots commercially available that can perform complex tasks and a bipedal robot wouldn’t necessarily be more useful to have. Even so, when it comes to robotics now and in the future, it comes to cost. A spot for example is about $75,000, factor in the cost of charging, maintaining and operating the robot which is all going to cost much more than simply just hiring a care worker or three. In the case of commercially available humanoid robots, you can probably multiply that cost by a factor of 10.
So ultimately, no care home in the world is going to sit there and say they will invest in one humanoid robot to do the work of one care worker for the price of 40 care workers. It doesn’t really matter either about the future scenario where there’s no enough care workers, if a care home doesn’t have enough care workers, it certainly doesn’t have enough money to invest in advanced robotics.
When the cost of a humanoid robot falls below the cost of a human, that’s when we’ll see humanoid robots in care homes. And, besides tests, trials and people with more money than sense, that’s not going to be in 15-20 years. It’s taken over 80 years for computing from the first prototypes to what we have today. Advanced humanoid robotics is very much in its pre-teen years still, in 15-20 years, maybe it could be analogous to those first valve operated computers to a 16bit console. When it becomes commercially viable to see them everywhere in many industries, which is when you’d see them in care homes, my guess would be more like around the year 2070.
Edit: Just to be clear, 2070 hangs on the assumption of a fully autonomous humanoid robot that can do anything a human can do, replacing a care worker.
All improbable technologies are perpetually 15-20 years away.