Robonanny

Birth rates in richer countries, such as the US, Japan and throughout Europe are falling and even countries like Sweden with a government campaign of supporting parents are not replacing their population, generation on generation. For these countries, the population is aging - fast. With care of the elderly under strain, several robot caregivers are in development.

Japan has a particular love affair with robotics of all kinds and leads the world in this field. Some of these machines, such as Paro developed to interact with dementia patients and RIBA to take the heavy lifting out of nursing show the potential of this technology to support human caregivers by providing inexhaustible patience, stamina and tolerance.

Because caregiving demands all those things and humans are, well, only human. One of the reasons suggested for falling birth rates is the stress that busy, working mothers experience trying to care of a baby without much support. So Yamamoto et al have taken a step towards the goal of building a robot that could care for a baby. In a recent paper they describe Julius - a machine that can distinguish between different kinds of baby cries. The technology is similar to that used for word recognition and the benchmarks for recognising different kinds of cries are originally set by human parental judgement. Using this system, Julius can tell whether a baby is hungry, uncomfortable or sleepy. If empathy is defined as the ability to recognise another’s feelings and respond appropriately, then Julius is a baby step towards developing an empathic machine.

But what could a robot baby caregiver actually do once it recognised why a baby was crying? Well, there are already robots that can detect the odour of soiled nappies, bottle feed, change an adults diaper or clean up bodily waste. But are we talking about supporting or replacing the mother? Yamamoto comments that ‘the system enables the person to stay apart from the baby when the baby is not in need of immediate care’. I can imagine the horror such a sentiment will produce from attachment-oriented parents the world over.

Many readers will be familiar with the infamous 1960s studies on newborn rhesus monkeys taken from their mothers that helped to establish attachment theory. Hard to believe now, that a hundred years ago affection towards young children was considered pointless if not actually harmful. Harlow’s maternally deprived monkeys became aggressive and unable to relate normally to other monkeys. But what if, rather than an inert piece of wire covered in terry cloth, the baby monkey was looked after by a robot that was warm and fuzzy, that groomed, cooed and nursed like a regular monkey? Is there a point at which the resulting adult monkeys would be indistinguishable from those raised by real monkey mothers? Might the robots even be too perfect? Perhaps some minor random spells of maternal irritation, neglect and even anger would need to be part of the program.

But surely nothing could ever replace the way a mother responds to her baby crying. We know that women focus on the sound of a baby crying more than men and that mothers are most efficient at processing the cry of their own baby. But when a baby cries relentlessly for some unfathomable reason it doesn’t necessarily make its mother feel warm, fuzzy and caring. There are many factors influencing how a mother responds to her baby, but for example, parents who are more physiologically hyperactive develop less tolerance to persistent high-pitched crying and may react more harshly. It’s not always easy to figure out why a baby is crying – is it possible that a robot, unencumbered by fatigue, guilt or other emotional baggage, might actually do better than a human in some situations?

Would women in developed countries have more children if they had robots to help them take care of them, and if so, how much caregiving would the robot need to provide? Maybe a high-end android could provide wealthier families with the perks of a live-in nanny without the complications of employing a person with human rights and demands while a less sophisticated model combined the functions of baby-monitor and pacifier to the rank and file working mother. Most of our children are already an experiment in the developmental effects of communicating with and via technology – beginning earlier - and perhaps even earlier.

It seems that Robonanny may be with us sooner than Robocop.