Название: Robots Won't Save Japan: An Ethnography of Eldercare Automation
Автор: James Wright
Издательство: ILR Press/Cornell University Press
Год: 2023
Страниц: 197
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.1 MB

Robots Won't Save Japan addresses the Japanese government's efforts to develop care robots in response to the challenges of an aging population, rising demand for eldercare, and a critical shortage of care workers. Drawing on ethnographic research at key sites of Japanese robot development and implementation, James Wright reveals how such devices are likely to transform the practices, organization, meanings, and ethics of caregiving if implemented at scale.

This new form of techno-welfare state that Japan is prototyping involves a reconfiguration of care that deskills and devalues care work and reduces opportunities for human social interaction and relationship building. Moreover, contrary to expectations that care robots will save labor and reduce health care expenditures, robots cost more money and require additional human labor to tend to the machines. As Wright shows, robots alone will not rescue Japan from its care crisis. The attempts to implement robot care instead point to the importance of looking beyond such techno-fixes to consider how to support rather than undermine the human times, spaces, and relationships necessary for sustainably cultivating good care.

This is a book about robots, Japan, and the future of care. It is about state and corporate attempts to bring together increasingly sophisticated, but also exceedingly hyped, robotic technologies with the unpre ce dented number of older people requiring care. It is also a book about what it means to do care work with robots. Are robots an ideal solution to the “prob lem” of aging, or do they create new prob lems of their own? Could a machine, or a suite of machines, partially or fully replace the need for human care workers? If so, what would become of care and care work?

Japan is an ideal case study in helping us explore the fantasy of robots solving the significant social and demographic challenges that confront aging post-industrial societies. The idea of robots coming to the rescue taps into a rich in vented tradition of Japan as “robot kingdom” which has been cultivated over decades, with relentless promotion of robots in popular culture and across state, media, and industry. Yet despite considerable domestic and international interest in eye-catching Japanese robots, actual knowledge about what kinds of technologies are being developed, how, and for what purposes remains scant. Many news stories portray an exoticized version of Japan that fails to capture the complex real ity of how care robots are developed and used, while many academic studies of robots are conducted by those with significant stakes in the success of the industry.

Pepper is a four- foot- high humanoid robot with abstracted and cartoonlike facial and bodily features and an outer layer made of white plastic. An article in the New Yorker memorably described it as looking like “a cross be tween a mermaid and the Pillsbury Doughboy”. It has a touchpad
mounted on its chest, large eyes that light up in diff er ent colors, and round circles for ears. The head contains both microphones and speakers to enable Pepper to communicate with users, as well as cameras for vision and touch sensors to detect when it is being patted on the head. It has arms, hands, and rubbery tactile fingers and a wheeled podium in place of legs; the head, arms, and hands can move, and it can also move around on its wheelbase, enabling it to perform dance moves or model upper body exercises. By default, it speaks in Japanese with a rather shrill, high-pitched voice; its En glish voice, intended for use in North America and Europe, is deeper. Pepper has no officially designated gender and is programmed to speak and behave in a manner that is childlike, cute, somewhat naive but also intended to seem emotionally intelligent and humorous. Its sleek, shiny white design is evocative of devices like Apple’s iPhone, with which Pepper shares the same Taiwanese manufacturer, Foxconn. Pepper serves as a hardware platform for its apps, which are mostly provided by external developers, and are accessed from the touchscreen on its chest. Like most care robots on the market, Pepper was not specifically designed for eldercare but was repurposed for care home recreation via specialized apps.