Across the developed world, the combination of slow economic growth and an ageing population is creating a market for cheap, hi-tech solutions to elderly care. There’s the RoboCoach: an android that is being used in Singapore to give exercise classes to senior citizens, using motion sensors to detect whether they are doing it right. Then there’s IBM’s Secure Living programme, being trialed in Italy, which puts sensors in the homes of elderly participants so their activities can be monitored from a remote control room. In China, the Roby Mini provides “companionship” to the elderly: it can recognise faces, tell jokes and order groceries. Of course, none of this really constitutes “care”, since the robots feel nothing for the people they serve. Neither do the corporations that make them: their chief interest is in harvesting data from living clients. Any human activities that might lead to higher costs – say, reading a book, rather than doing health-boosting exercise with the RoboCoach – will be strongly discouraged. Welcome to the “dystopian future” of ageing.  (Evgeny Morozov, The Observer).

As a follower of Epicurus I look out for people and companies who are exploiting, dissing, talking down to and ignoring the humanity of people old and young.  Care homes are a very good example of the corporatization and the putting of profit before humane treatment.  All too often they are dreary, featureless places where the only distraction is day-long TV, tuned to channels that cater to the lowest common denominator.  The food is dreadful, the care is cursory, and the “personnel” can be rude and even cruel (we are supposed to call them “carers”). I have the suspicion that caring for helpless old people is not the first choice of job for many poorly paid people: the result can be favoritism, bullying, and indifference. Before going into such a place my wife and I will, I hope, shake hands on a suicide pact, if the interfering nosey-parkers in Congress haven’t rendered voluntary euthanasia illegal.