Good old days with your robot

Friendly robots will look after many of today's workers when they retire, says a leading scientist.

Dr David Bibby, general manager of science policy at the crown research institute Industrial Research, believes robots will be necessary because there will be too few working-age people to look after the expected numbers of the elderly.

He told a conference of Engineers for Social Responsibility in Wellington that robots would be designed not just to do physical work for old people but to meet their needs for companionship.

"What's more, while you are with it, it's monitoring your heart rate and your blood pressure and it's linked to a central station so that if you need care, it's going to be able to call for care," he said.

Dr Bibby also predicted that old people would increasingly have to look after themselves, because they would have only one or two children, who would be likely to live in another part of the world.

But he said Japan was already experimenting with robot dogs to provide companionship for residents in old people's homes.

"Sony toy dogs were not designed for psychological needs ... They were just sophisticated toys," he said.

"Then they took them to an old people's home ... and you saw these people perk up."

Dr Bibby said the birth rate had dropped so steeply in Japan that by 2040 there would be 63 people aged 65 and over for every 100 working-age people aged 20 to 64.

The same trend was now occurring in other countries.

Even in Catholic Italy, childbearing had dropped in just 10 years from an average of 2.1 children for every woman to only 1.3.

"That's unbelievably fast," Dr Bibby said.

Last week, the United Nations chief demographer predicted that world population would rise from its present 6 billion to peak at 8 to 9 billion - well short of the previous predicted peak of 10 billion - in 2050.

Said Dr Bibby: "That means we have children, and in their lifetimes they will see the world population peak and start to fall."

The population "pyramid", with fewer people in older age groups than in younger age groups, would be reversed for the first time in human history, apart from short-term episodes of war and pestilence.

There would no longer be enough working-age people to look after the elderly with current staffing levels.

"We are going to have to find ways of caring for the elderly that are automated. Japan and Korea are both working on robots for care of the elderly," he said.

"If you are fit enough to sit up on your bed, your robot will ... lift you up with a couple of joy sticks.

"You will be able to lean on your robot and do things at the bench or the sink."

He said menial jobs of all kinds would be done by robots. New Zealand, for example, would need robots to pick fruit and prune vineyards.

But Auckland University engineering lecturer Kepa Morgan said engineers should think about the ethics of handing old people over to robots before rushing into such new technology.

"That led to one person saying that within 30 years voluntary euthanasia would be quite common because we can make these technological advances that mean that people can live forever."

He contrasted Pakeha society, which trained people at universities and pushed them into top positions at a young age, with Maori society, which valued the wisdom that came with life experience.

A consultant ecologist, Dr Wren Green, said that, rather than giving old people robots, it would be better to encourage healthy living so that they could continue to contribute to society in old age.

"We assume that aged care will require high-tech, but we need to change the dynamic of how we think about living," he said.

"There is another way to approach the whole issue. Why do we always have to assume that it has to be a high-tech solution?"