Old Age Will Be Different in the Robotic Age |
America faces an eldercare crisis. We have a rapidly aging population, a declining birthrate, and a care-giving workforce that is burning out and increasingly facing deportation. From 2023 to 2024, the number of adults 65 and older grew by 3.1% while the number of children under 18 shrank. In nearly half of U.S. counties, seniors outnumber children. Half of Americans 65 and older have nothing at all saved for future living assistance. We must start thinking about who will take care of grandma and grandpa.
For most families, outsourcing eldercare is prohibitively expensive—upward of $75,000 a year for a home health aide and well over $100,000 for a nursing home. Only when assets run down will Medicaid start footing the bill, though many wrongly assume Medicare will help. Nearly a third of Americans 65 and older live alone.
I believe that robots will assume the care of many of them.
A robot would ideally be a one-time expense, requiring minimal maintenance and receiving updates through cloud-computing technology. A limited number of friends and relatives would struggle to provide unpaid stopgap care to aging adults. By contrast, a robot could function around the clock. I’ve treated elderly patients who had been found wandering the streets, lying in their own excrement, or simply dehydrated because of gaps in care. A tireless robot—made possible through gains in battery life and the ability to self-charge—could mitigate such problems.
But robot caregivers leave all of us with........