Elder care and Turkle--comments on Love's Labor Lost
"When children ask, 'Don't we have people for these jobs?' they remind us that our allocation of resources is a social choice" (Turkle 108)
I have a number of thoughts on this chapter that deals with the elderly and elder care.
One woman in touch with Turkle wrote her an email that said "if..robots are designed to compliment humans and not replace them, then I am all for it" (qtd. in Turkle 122).
Imagine that you have an elderly relative with a debilitating and terminal organ failure. Imagine that that organ failure results in neurological dysfunction (to be specific: liver failure slowly poisons the brain. It has a specific name: hepatic encephalopathy). There is a medicine that lessens this, but it results for many patients in severe and sudden incontinence.
A human caretaker, given a choice between a lucid but very messy patient and a very ill and cognitively non-functioning patient might choose the latter. To many of us who consider people to be more "there" when they are cognitively functioning, this is a tragic decision, but one that you could hardly blame the caretaker for, especially if they were an exhausted family member doing this work on top of many other responsibilities.
This seems to be a case where a robot could provide better care AND the patient and family would all be better off.
I've also spent significant time with a very close relative suffering from severe dementia. But I remember one time noticing a connection in the seemingly nonsensical series of words she uttered; I particularly remember her talking about time, then touching her face. Because the connection was so obvious--a watch has a face, a person has a face, therefore face-time are related, I, for a moment, understood the logic of dementia. What if programs could sort through patterns of relationships in such a way as to make sense of--or understand the connections being made--by a person suffering from dementia?
In her conclusion to this chapter, "Do Robots Cure Conscience," Turkle seems very worried. In rethinking this, I believe Turkle is arguing that being a person is becoming too easy, and that we're letting robots function as an excuse for being basically lazy moral beings. She writes:
Programs become opaque when we are at our computers, most of us only deal with surfaces. We summon screen icons to act as agents. We are pleased to lose track of the mechanisms behind them and take them 'at interface value.' But as we summon them to life, our programs come to seem almost companions. Now 'almost' has almost left the equation. Online agents and sociable robots are explicitly designed to convince us that they are adequate companions" (124)
I think, ultimately, Turkle is dealing with two different problems. One, she doesn't think robots are/can be/ are the right kind of moral, or maybe not moral, but she's worried that we are so ready to see their as performing functions as something more--as a human-like existence. But robots are exactly as moral as we make them. They will follow their program or command as entered.
Turkle's second problem, and the one I tried to highlight with the first quote at the beginning, is human behavior and values. She's worried about that with abusive kids that beat MyRealBabies and cut up furbies into 18 pieces, and she's worried about it with Edna who choses the RealBaby over her real greatgrandbaby, and she's worried about it with America and our desire to leave behind our elderly. But that's not a robot problem.