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In September 2020, it was announced that, following a successful trial, a humanoid robot named Pepper could soon be rolled out across UK nursing homes to help combat feelings of isolation and loneliness in residents (rolled out literally, as Pepper runs on wheels). Diminutive, wide-eyed, and friendly looking, Pepper was designed, as lead researcher Chris Papadopoulos explains, to "help fill lonely periods when, because of a stretched social care system, staff do not have time to keep residents company."1 To facilitate this, Pepper is embedded with "artificial intelligence that is culturally competent" so that "if it met an English resident, it would load up its cultural knowledge base … and have a guess that that English person may enjoy rugby or cricket or football or typical sports associated with English people, as opposed to baseball or basketball or sumo wrestling."2 Able to engage in rudimentary conversations with residents, Pepper is just one of the numerous emergent intelligent machines that are capable of mimicking, facilitating, or independently undertaking tasks previously carried out exclusively by human agents within the healthcare system. Other models currently on the global market include Dinsow, which allows elderly individuals to connect with doctors and loved ones via an inbuilt video monitor; Paro, a zoomorphic robot baby seal that has therapeutic applications for Alzheimer's patients; ROBEAR, "the strong robot with the gentle touch" that is capable of lifting patients from bed to chair;3 and SARA, which like Pepper, functions "as [a] social entity in nursing homes to improve the quality of care where possible."4
This explosion of artificial intelligences promises a paradigm shift in the relationship between the providers and recipients of care. As the most physically obvious manifestation of this change, care robots exemplify a plethora of challenges clustered around AI, from fears around safety—what if ROBEAR dropped their charge?—to issues regarding personal autonomy and sector-wide employment threats. More fundamentally, these artificially intelligent entities embody and intensify profound concerns around the practical and ethical construction of care itself: what it means, how it feels, and how it might be delivered, measured, and maintained. With global events from the economic crash of the early 2000s to the present COVID-19 crisis exposing and exacerbating the precarious state of health services...
