[HN Gopher] Garmi, a robot nurse and companion for Germany's eld...
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Garmi, a robot nurse and companion for Germany's elderly population
Author : mennaali
Score : 30 points
Date : 2023-03-20 17:50 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.popsci.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.popsci.com)
| lnsru wrote:
| An elderly lady just died in the neighborhood at the age of 67
| from something diabetes related. It shocked me to see me how well
| dressed and with which expensive car their kids arrived to clear
| the rented place. The lady could barely walk, but was living in
| the 1st floor. She wasn't able to reach ground floor alone in
| most days.
|
| What I want to say is I am still shocked from the heartless
| western society where it is the norm to put one's parents into
| ugly understaffed, but very expensive care facility waiting them
| to die. Even a modern one with a crate on wheels with a display
| in it.
| tester756 wrote:
| Have you considered what was the dynamic between them? how
| mentally stable that elderly people are?
|
| I've spent over one year living with person with alcoholic
| dementia
|
| and I've heard stories of other people with similar problems
| and this is pure terror that you cannot even imagine unless you
| live thru it.
| lnsru wrote:
| Sorry to hear your story. But I don't think, that it is a
| major population problem. I am rather from East, there were
| hard cases but or complex medical needs of the elderly in my
| childhood, but most parents died in the same living space
| with their kids. Here in Germany it is standard to put old
| people in care homes and complain how expensive they are.
| [deleted]
| thombat wrote:
| My elderly mother is determined to end her days in the city she
| spent most of her life in. Fair enough, but that's at least
| five hours drive away from where I'm living with my family and
| job. She has had a couple of minor strokes already and has
| dizzy spells that make continuing to walk up the stairs
| increasingly perilous, and she routinely forgets to take her
| medicines. So she needs routine hands-on care. I could provide
| a poor version of this by incessantly shuttling across the
| country (destroying my own family - her grandchildren - in the
| process), I could try to browbeat her into moving cities &
| become public enemy #1, or I can keep with the current project
| of moving her into the nicest & most supportive residential
| care I can find.
| version_five wrote:
| We need laws to prevent pawning off people we dont care about
| onto automated care. Everybody should be against this.
|
| Related comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35199966
| ragebol wrote:
| But we do care about those people, but if there's not enough
| people to properly take care of all people we want to care for,
| shifting some of the tasks (not all, that is not desirable nor
| possible) seems the best solution. Giving more care in total
| with the same amount of people.
|
| In an ideal world, there's enough care for everyone, but in an
| aging population, that is not possible.
| version_five wrote:
| It's not care, it's pawning them off, it's the opposite of
| care.
|
| Read Bullshit Jobs. An easy fix for countries with socialized
| healthcare would be to get rid of bureaucrats and hire front
| line workers that actually contribute something. Programs
| like this are the end-state of bureaucrat-run societies,
| where nobody who actually does any useful work is left.
|
| The point of caring for someone is caring, through real
| interaction. It's one thing, if horrible, to force people to
| interact with a voice-menu system when they call in
| somewhere. This is like a nightmare version of that.
|
| The fact that people seem to now think a chatbot that strings
| word patterns together is sentient will only make this worse,
| as the ignorant (just saw a sibling comment) will believe
| that "AI" will fix the problem, instead of actual personal
| interaction.
| rocket_surgeron wrote:
| By 2055, Japan's population is projected to fall to 90
| million, with (medium fertility/medium mortality):
|
| 8 million being children aged 0-14
|
| 46 million being "working aged" 15-64
|
| 36 million being 65 or older
|
| Population Projections for Japan: 2006-2055 Outline of
| Results, Methods, and Assumptions (PDF)
| https://www.ipss.go.jp/webj-
| ad/WebJournal.files/population/2...
|
| Let's ignore the assertion that 15 and 16 year olds are
| "working aged" no matter how you allocate resources 46
| million workers cannot support 36 million retirees.
|
| Today there are around 3 million healthcare workers in
| Japan out of a working aged population of 80 million. In 30
| years the number of retirees will be the same but the
| working aged population will roughly halve. This is just
| people working in hospitals, in-home care specialists are
| not counted. Nor are bureaucrats, only workers in 24
| categories of direct-support healthcare fields are counted.
|
| Human Resources for Health Country Profiles: Japan (PDF)
| https://apps.who.int/iris/rest/bitstreams/1147882/retrieve
|
| There are already critical shortages of healthcare workers
| and in 30 years the demand will be the just about the same
| (most healthcare resources are consumed by the elderly) but
| the labor pool will be smaller.
|
| If there were 0 bureaucrats there still wouldn't be enough
| people.
|
| Many European nations face the same demographic challenges
| that Japan does, to a very slightly less severe degree.
|
| Robots are one solution.
| version_five wrote:
| If there were 0 bureaucrats there still wouldn't be
| enough people
|
| Whether or not that's true, making the denial of basic
| human interaction the front line of creating "efficiency"
| is not the place to start. Not only is it dehumanizing,
| it encourages all of the wrong kind of behaviors,
| particularly administrative bloat, and ignores the reason
| we have social programs in the first place. If we've
| collectively decided we want to care for a group, we have
| to actually do it, not pay administrators to pretend it's
| being done.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Like your computer is pretending you're submitting a
| comment, rather than _actually_ coming to my house to
| explain your point of view?
| ragebol wrote:
| > Read Bullshit Jobs
|
| Read my comment again
|
| > hire front line workers
|
| What if you already got rid of the bureaucrats, hired
| everyone you can and still don't have enough people? Pay
| more? Sure, but that also has limits in both the amount of
| people you can pay and the money running out.
|
| Let those robot distribute fresh clothes and collect
| laundry, stock the fridges, clean the bathroom, all those
| menial tasks that allow people to have a decent life. Clear
| up the time from humans to actually interact with people.
|
| I don't like the prospect of needing someone to wipe my ass
| when I'm old, I'd feel ashamed. Maybe not when a robot does
| it. Not sure about that yet, I hope that day is far far
| away.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| This is the same problem healthcare has in general. There
| just _are not enough_ healthcare workers to see to every
| person carefully.
|
| Even if we massively raised the incentives and lowered the
| barriers for entry, the situation would still be nearly as
| bad. The human body is incredibly complicated and each person
| has a long medical history. Each person needs personalized
| care, but we can't devote 50% of the population to healthcare
| either.
|
| The only viable long-term solution is automated tools. We're
| no-where near it yet (maybe in a hundred years) but gAI will
| eventually be our solution.
| luckylion wrote:
| What's the alternative? No care at all? Devote all assets to
| only care for the elderly? End people's lives at 75 so we don't
| have too many old people to care for? Have forced labor take
| care of it?
| dmn322 wrote:
| The monetary system works by (a) government spending (b)
| lending from banks. The money from the banks pretty much just
| gloms onto the supply chain that grows up around the
| government spending... banks just lend to things that already
| have money, and the things that already have money before
| banks tend to get it from direct government spending. As debt
| is paid off, liquidity is removed from the system. Also as
| the filthy rich stock money into their hedge funds, it is
| also removed from the system for practical purposes. So
| without a constant inflation pressure, we instead get
| deflation. Now imagine if instead of supplying that inflation
| pressure by keeping a low interest rate for banks, we
| supplied it by spending money on an army of caretakers? Well
| you'd end up with people having money in their pockets for a
| change which would cause short term inflation like we just
| saw from the stimulus, but then once people had their needs
| supplied m, it would calm down and we'd just have more people
| employed. The downside for the rich would be that more of the
| population would have savings and thus be harder to
| manipulate. But i think lots of people would find more
| satisfaction at that than their current jobs, many of which
| only exist for the sake of "We need to create jobs," or
| because of some bloated financial middleman industry we
| created through government spending that had lobbyists get in
| the mix
| tomalaci wrote:
| I am sure robot assistants will be quite integral to our society
| later but am I just uninformed or does there seem to be lack of
| progress for the actual mechanical engineering of robots? They
| all still seem these big, hulking and clunky metal pieces with
| very rigid movements (not very flexible). One of them might also
| just slip on a banana peel and crush someone.
| comfypotato wrote:
| They're just very complicated.
|
| A good exercise is to think of all of the computations required
| to point at something across the room. From a biomechanics
| perspective, there is a lot going on. Even if you just model
| each muscle in your arm/hand/finger as attached at two points
| and contracting, the force diagram of all the bones/joints
| quickly becomes exhausting.
|
| The biomechanics of what humans do for basic locomotion is
| extremely complicated to model/recreate. While robots don't
| need all the details (wheels, for example, make things easier)
| there is still a lot to deal with to make machines that can
| interact with our world.
|
| It's one thing to design an assembly-line robot that performs a
| single task. Making a robot that can do multiple useful things
| quickly explodes in complexity. There is steady progress in the
| field, but it's slow.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Let's just take care of eachother like human beings
| uniqueuid wrote:
| That will be a tough order with the projected demographic
| development, according to which elderly will soon outnumber
| working population.
| sva_ wrote:
| Having a short look at the population pyramid of Germany
| makes this pretty clear:
|
| https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_Pyramid.
| ..
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#/med.
| ..
| standardUser wrote:
| If we get our shit together and tax the people with all the
| money at a rate that allows us to handle basic care for the
| vast majority of people without a lot of money, we can do this.
| Otherwise, we cannot.
| adaml_623 wrote:
| What are you proposing the community does with the collected
| money to help the elderly?
| version_five wrote:
| Not a popular opinion here apparently. "Disruption" I guess.
| When VC tech touches on caring for people, the psychopathy
| becomes more evident.
| luckylion wrote:
| It's not "an unpopular opinion", it's equivalent to "let's
| just all be friendly, we won't need a police", "let's just
| all promise to not access other people's email, we don't need
| passwords" etc: naive to a dangerous degree.
|
| Elderly care is expensive. Resources are limited. Denying
| basic reality doesn't work.
| standardUser wrote:
| I read no lies in this comment.
| badcppdev wrote:
| I have very little experience with old people.
|
| When I grow up I want a robot who can pick me up when I fall over
| because the lady in the flat above me had to bang on the floor
| for ages at 2am before I woke up and organised help for her.
|
| And I'd like the robot to be able to take dinner off the stove if
| I get distracted while I'm cooking my dinner because the nice old
| man in the flat a few doors down burnt his dinner and there was
| tons of smoke. He was fine but his dinner wasn't.
|
| I don't know what the robot will be able to do to help with
| social isolation but I've got some time to figure out ideas. I
| don't really want my kids to take care of me when they are in
| their 50s and 60s. They should be able to enjoy themselves.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Until a hundred or so years ago globally, and still almost
| everywhere - with the exception of the richest countries - kids
| enjoy themselves in their 50s and 60s while sharing space and
| time with the elderly.
|
| No isolation, no robots, no aimlessness for the elderly as they
| continue contributing while imprinting the history of their
| lineage into the younger generations.
|
| The fast food approach to birth, living, aging and dying may
| not be the best possible approach.
| [deleted]
| ragebol wrote:
| Years ago I worked in a startup also trying to develop such
| robots, to care for both disabled and elderly people. We were too
| early, but alas.
|
| The complaint this would increase loneliness was often heard,
| mostly by the human caretakers employed by the care homes we were
| testing in.
|
| Especially the younger disabled people did not have much issue
| with the robots: they hoped to get a way to be more independent.
| Friends & family enough to not be lonely anyways. And sometimes
| you just want to get a drink, grab a dropped pen or go to the
| bathroom without needing to push a button and wait for someone to
| come help you.
|
| IIRC, this held true for the elderly as well, to a lesser extent.
| Ideally, robot clear up time from menial, mechanical labor to
| offer more social interaction to avoid loneliness. This is far
| off though and our world is far from ideal...
| version_five wrote:
| Ideally, robot clear up time from menial, mechanical labor to
| offer more social interaction to avoid loneliness. This is far
| off though and our world is far from ideal...
|
| That has never happened in the history of "efficiency", it's a
| lie people use to pretend that jobs won't be cut. What actually
| happens is the savings are repurposed for administrative bloat.
| ragebol wrote:
| Our dishwasher, washing machine and vacuum robot have all
| given my wife and I more quality time with our kids and
| ourselves.
| smolder wrote:
| It could be argued that those modern conveniences just made
| it possible for both parents in a family to work. Nowadays,
| dual full time income is normal.
| layer8 wrote:
| And, to the GPs point, they obsoleted the job of a
| housemaid that well-off (and even not-so-well-off) families
| used to employ a hundred years ago or so.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| They didn't, though. What they actually did was allow your
| wife to have the second full-time job which is now required
| in order to own a home.
| thombat wrote:
| Still makes them a benefit to that family: if his wife
| was at home doing more housework the 1920s way then they
| wouldn't have the same house.
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(page generated 2023-03-20 23:01 UTC)