AI is coming for our aging parents, ready or not

At first glance, AI companions for lonely seniors can seem dystopian, looking less like innovation than a bleak sign of social failure. Spending a couple days last week in Tokyo nursing homes, I watched plushie robots the size of human babies being handed to aging parents and grandparents, and prototypes of conversational dolls aimed to fill gaps when family, community and human care fall short, according to the Tribune news Service.

It reminded me of showing ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode to my own 97-year-old grandfather last summer, shortly after my grandmother passed away. He was appalled, making clear he had no interest in chatting with the artificially cheery voice.

And yet my instinct to recoil at this all collides with a harder reality. Japan, like much of Asia, is aging fast and running short of caregivers. It’s no surprise that policymakers are turning to technology. The nation is expected to face a shortage of 570,000 care workers by 2040, making the search for solutions increasingly urgent. And the meteoric rise of AI makes companion robots an attractive policy goal.

But they’re no panacea. They may have a place in the future of care, but the bigger risk is that governments and companies will use them to dodge the harder fixes required to treat care work as essential infrastructure. This involves increasing wages, supporting seniors who want to live at home, and focusing on targeted tech solutions that help people maintain independence as they age.

Japan, long a leader in industrial automation, has been trying to make eldercare robots happen for a long time. Despite the immense hype, headlines and millions of dollars in government funding, it has yielded mixed results. Ghosts of these past efforts are still being put to use. In one of the facilities I visited, Softbank Group Corp.’s since-discontinued Pepper slumped in the corner of a room before it was rebooted to conduct an exercise class — alongside a human handler who was doing the same motions right beside it. Some patients seemed genuinely drawn to a stuffed animal robotic toy that would coo and react to touch, but the artificial bark rang in my ears for hours afterward.

In his 2023 book Robots Won’t Save Japan, ethnographic researcher James Wright argues that the country’s costly push into eldercare automation often produced unintended consequences and, in some cases, more work for staffers. Much of the money might have been better spent elsewhere, he notes. But Wright’s fieldwork largely predates the AI shock that has breathed new life into this push.

Despite persistent stereotypes, Japan hasn’t widely embraced the idea of robots as friends. The country had the lowest share of respondents that said they were “extremely excited” about AI companions in an Ipsos survey of 21 countries. It also had the highest share — 46% — of people who said they have not used an AI tool or application in the last 12 months. There is no doubt AI has the potential to revolutionise workflows, especially in care facilities. But those efforts might be better spent on easing caregivers’ administrative burdens than replacing their face time with patients.

At one nursing home, the hopes for the potential of AI companion toys from their creators and caregivers was contagious. Even loving families cannot be present 24 hours a day, and engaging with the stuffed toy seemed better than staring at a wall. The engineered friendliness of chatbots has sowed concerns for its impact on young users, but what if that drive for engagement is conversely useful if it’s aimed at keeping lonely seniors cognitively engaged?

Experimentation is spreading across Asia. In South Korea, government-led public welfare programs have distributed 14,000 AI-powered “Hyodol” devices to elderly people, baby-sized plushies that use ChatGPT to communicate. In China, some retirees are turning to apps like ByteDance Ltd.’s Doubao for ordinary frustrations of aging, like deciphering tiny print on instruction manuals. Tencent Holdings Ltd. said last month that it has run more than 200 local workshops teaching seniors how to use its Yuanbao chatbot for tasks such as asking for life hacks and recipes.