Robin is a therapeutic robot programed to act like a 7-year-old girl as it travels around nursing homes and hospitals’ pediatric units providing emotional support while helping to combat staffing shortages.
I don’t think it’s more expensive to hire people for this work than to develop and produce a bunch of robots that are obviously not up to the task.
How could they ever be? Loneliness can only be adressed through sincere human contact. Any other (robotic) solution is financially wasteful at best and disastrously counterproductive at worst.
Developing the robots is mostly up front costs (between paying someone to “code” the thing and then buying the units) vs paying however many employees forever which is why I say it’s more expensive.
If they could make an actual genai I think it could help with loneliness but we won’t be there anytime soon, if ever, the way they keep following a strategy of scaling and optimizing a speech center.
I don’t think it’s more expensive to hire people for this work than to develop and produce a bunch of robots that are obviously not up to the task.
How could they ever be? Loneliness can only be adressed through sincere human contact. Any other (robotic) solution is financially wasteful at best and disastrously counterproductive at worst.
Developing the robots is mostly up front costs (between paying someone to “code” the thing and then buying the units) vs paying however many employees forever which is why I say it’s more expensive.
If they could make an actual genai I think it could help with loneliness but we won’t be there anytime soon, if ever, the way they keep following a strategy of scaling and optimizing a speech center.