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Freedom Fox's avatar

When I finally traveled outside the US for the first time I spent a great deal of time in Latin America. I traveled light, backpacking, outside of tourist areas, getting to know the people I met without those artificial barriers. One of the biggest differences that stuck with me was the commitment to family that was prevalent there, in stark contrast to the US and even much of western Europe. Multiple generations will often live together there. Which has wonderful benefits I hadn't even considered. I've always been a very free spirit, an explorer, adventurer, cherishing my freedom and seeing family ties as an adult to enjoy on my own time, not daily. I love my freedom. It's how I was raised and enculturated.

But my travel showed me that maintaining strong family contact, even living with family has great value that our society is sorely lacking, the pendulum having swung too far away from the grounding, love and caring that multigenerational family life provides.

For one, when children share a house with parents and grandparents a caretaker is always available. No need to pay a babysitter or drop the kids off at daycare. Where a $12/hr stranger (we pay more like $40/hr to their employer) is entrusted to care for your most precious creation. While many daycare workers are caring, loving people there's no better caretaker than a loving family member. Even the difficult ones. Blood is blood. So while the parent works the grandparents tend to the young children.

Then as the grandparents age and the children begin to grow up, become teenagers the roles sort of reverse, with the older children assisting their elderly grandparents through their daily lives, help care for them as they become less and less capable of caring for themselves. Again, not having to pay home health aides, strangers, to look after them, or pay to warehouse them in assisted living or nursing home, getting the same $12/hr strangers to care for our most cherished family members.

Our society's family values are actually quite insane when you think about it. Turning over those people we have the most connection with, the most love for each other to the care of strangers just doing their jobs. This isn't an indictment of those who do those jobs. But with rare exception in extremely dysfunctional and abusive family constructs, we love and care for our own blood more than we do a stranger.

The use of robots to act as caretakers for our most cherished and valuable people in our lives is an affront to our humanity. It's a level of selfishness that exceeds the lows our culture has already sunk to by reducing the importance of family as we have, especially recognizing how other cultures elevate and exalt the importance of family. If anything we should be tacking more towards the healthier multigenerational family constructs found in Latin America and many other regions of the world than further away into our selfish narcissistic pursuits. Robot caretakers, even cute machines designed to trick our brains into humanizing lead to a Dystopian, inhumane future. We have much to learn from those our society considers poor, unenlightened and backwards.

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LC's avatar

There is some help that some elders might prefer from robots. Like help with the restroom, bathing and other things that might cause embarrassment and are normally private. In that case it should be seen as an accessibility tool. Why aren’t they focusing their efforts there instead of toward this inhuman companionship BS, which is inherently fake. And there is already a non-human solution for this. They are called pets. But, I’ve suddenly seen a lot if anti-pet stuff from some environmentalists.

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