Could our future nurses and caregivers be robots?

Welcome your new job takers and caregivers. The coming decade will see societies transform as humans learn to live alongside robots.

Japan is home to the longest-living citizens on earth and the biggest elderly population of any country—and it’s not getting any younger. Japan’s current life expectancy is 80 years for men and 87 years for women and is expected to rise to 84 and 91, respectively, over the next 45 years. Between 2010 and 2025, the number of Japanese citizens 65 years or older is expected to increase by 7 million. Today, 25 percent of Japan’s population is age 65 or older. By 2020, this is projected to increase to 29 percent and reach 39 percent by 2050.

All of those long-living elderly will need caretakers. Yet Japan’s low birthrates mean that what once was a staple of Japanese family life—taking care of one’s grandparents and great-grandparents—will no longer be a viable model at the scale the nation needs. There will not be enough grandchildren.

With Japan’s persistently strict immigration policies curtailing the number of workers in the country, there will not be enough humans around to do the job at all. Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare predicts a need for 4 million eldercare nurses by 2025. Right now there are only 1.49 million in the country. Japan allows only 50,000 work visas annually, and unless something drastic changes, the math does not work.

This labor shortage will hit service-industry jobs like eldercare with ferocity and will be exacerbated because caretakers have a high job turnover rate due to low pay and high rates of work-related injury from lifting patients.

Enter the robots.

Our future caretakers are being developed in a Japanese factory right now. Just as Japanese companies reinvented cars in the 1970s and consumer electronics in the 1980s, they are now reinventing the family. The robots depicted in the movies and cartoons of the 1960s and 1970s will become the reality of the 2020s.

Rival Japanese companies Toyota and Honda are leveraging their expertise in mechanical engineering to invent the next generation of robots. Toyota built a nursing aide named Robina—modeled after Rosie, the cartoon robot nanny and housekeeper in The Jetsons—as part of their Partner Robot Family, a line of robots to take care of the world’s growing geriatric population. Robina is a “female” robot, 60 kilograms in weight and 1.2 meters tall, that can communicate using words and gestures. She has wide-set eyes, a moptop hairdo, and even a flowing white metallic skirt.

Robina’s brother, Humanoid, serves as a multipurpose home assistant. He can do the dishes, take care of your parents when they’re sick, and even provide impromptu entertainment: one model plays the trumpet, another the violin. Both versions are doppelgangers for the famous Star Wars C-3PO robot, although in gleaming white instead of gold.

In response, Honda has created ASIMO (the Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility robot), a fully functional humanoid that looks like a four-foot-tall astronaut stuck on Earth. ASIMO is sophisticated enough to interpret human emotions, movements, and conversation. Equipped with cameras that function as eyes, ASIMO can follow voice commands, shake hands, and answer questions with a nod or by voice. He even bows to greet others, demonstrating good Japanese manners. For an elderly patient, ASIMO can fulfill a range of tasks, from helping the patient get out of bed to holding a conversation.

Honda is also focusing much of its research and commercialization on robotic limbs and assistance devices that are robotic but not free-standing robots. Its Walking Assist device wraps around the legs and back of people with weakened leg muscles, giving them extra power to move on their own. In the future, expect to see Honda making robotic hands and arms. Its goal is nothing less than helping paraplegics walk and the very frail rediscover the speed and power of their youth.

Numerous other Japanese companies are pushing the big players like Toyota and Honda. Tokai Rubber Industries, in conjunction with the Japanese research institute RIKEN, has unveiled the Robot for Interactive Body Assistance (RIBA), which can pick up and set down humans up to 175 pounds and is designed for patient comfort: it resembles a giant smiling bear and is covered in a soft skin to guard against injury or pain.

Similarly, Japanese industrial automation company AIST has created PARO, a robot baby harp seal covered in soft white fur. PARO exhibits many of the same behaviors as a real pet. Designed for those who are too frail to care for a living animal or who live in environments that don’t allow pets, such as nursing homes, it enjoys being held, gets angry when hit, and likes to nap.When President Barack Obama met PARO a few years ago on a tour of Japanese robotics innovations, he instinctually reached out and rubbed its head and back. It looks like a cute stuffed animal, but costs $6,000 and is classified by the US government as a class 2 medical device.

Japan already leads the world in robotics, operating 310,000 of the 1.4 million industrial robots in existence across the world. It’s turning to eldercare robots in part because it has to and in part because it, uniquely, is in a great position to leverage its advanced industrial technology toward the long assembly line of the human life span. But can robots really take care of humans?

“For the idea of artificial companionship to be our new normal, we have to change ourselves, and in the process we are remaking human values and human connection.” — Sherry Turkle, MIT professor

Japan’s private and public sectors certainly think so. In 2013, the Japanese government granted $24.6 million to companies focusing on eldercare robotics. Japan’s prominent Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry chose 24 companies in May 2013 to receive subsidies covering one-half to two-thirds of the R&D costs for nursing care robots. Tasks for these robots include helping the elderly move between rooms; keeping tabs on those likely to wander; and providing entertainment through games, singing, and dancing.

Nevertheless, difficult challenges remain. On the technical side, it remains difficult to design robots capable of intimate activities like bathing patients or brushing their teeth. And most Japanese companies that are developing these robots specialize in industrial motors and electronic automation. They didn’t enter the caretaking field with a keen grasp of how to forge an emotional connection, a crucial aspect of eldercare. Even as they improve, some observers— like Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT—question whether patients will ever be able to form a true emotional connection with robot caretakers. As Turkle warns, “For the idea of artificial companionship to be our new normal, we have to change ourselves, and in the process we are remaking human values and human connection.”

If robot nurses catch on, she explains, they may even create a chasm between younger and older generations. “It’s not just that older people are supposed to be talking,” Turkle argues, referring to the goal of creating robots that can hold conversation, “younger people are supposed to be listening. We are showing very little interest in what our elders have to say. We are building the machines that will literally let their stories fall on deaf ears.”

These technical questions (Can a robot brush a person’s teeth?) and almost-spiritual doubts (Can, and should, emotional connections be made between humans and robots?) are both valid. Yet robot technology and applicability continue to advance in Japan, and answers to these questions will likely arise there in the near future. With too few caretakers, I expect robots to become a regular part of the Japanese family system.

If the aging nation can pull it off, robot caretakers will be a boon for its economy and will soon make the jump to the global economy, with potentially far-reaching consequences.

Much of the rest of the industrialized world is on the verge of a period of advanced aging that will mirror Japan’s own. In Europe, all 28 member states of the European Union have populations that are growing older, and in the decades ahead, the percentage of Europe’s population aged 65 and older will grow from 17 percent to 30 percent. China is already entering a period of advanced aging even as it continues to develop. Although its one-child policy is already being phased out, China is now demographically lopsided. Chinese women have on average 1.4 children, well below the replacement rate of 2.1, resulting in too few young people to provide for the elderly. The notable exception is the United States, where immigration policies partially mitigate the effects of an aging population.

As the populations of developed nations continue to age, they create a big market for those Japanese robots. And caretaking robots, alongside robotic limb technology, may simply be the first in a new wave of complex robots entering our everyday lives. Robots will be the rare technology that reaches the mainstream through elderly users first, spreading down as grandma shows off her next cutting-edge gadget for the kids and grandkids.

THE GEO-ROBOTIC LANDSCAPE

The robot landscape will be vastly differentiated by country. Just as wealthier and poorer citizens reside at different technological levels, so do wealthier and poorer countries.

A few countries have already established themselves as leading robot societies. About 70 percent of total robot sales take place in Japan, China, the United States, South Korea, and Germany—known as the “big five” in robotics. Japan, the United States, and Germany dominate the landscape in high-value industrial and medical robots, and South Korea and China are major producers of less expensive consumer-oriented robots. While Japan records the highest number of robot sales, China represents the most rapidly growing market, with sales increasing by 25 percent every year since 2005.

There is quite a gap between the big five and the rest of the world. As both consumers and producers of robots, these countries outpace all others. By way of illustration, the number of industrial robots produced in South Korea, a country of 50 million people, is several times greater than the number produced in South America, Central America, Africa, and India combined, with populations totaling 2.8 billion. Russia is effectively a nonplayer in robotics despite its industrial base. It neither produces nor buys robots to any significant degree, instead maintaining extractive industries (natural gas, oil, iron, nickel) and industrial manufacturing plants that look and function the way they did in the 1970s and 1980s.

Robots will be the rare technology that reaches the mainstream through elderly users first, spreading down as grandma shows off her next cutting-edge gadget for the kids and grandkids.

The big five’s comparative advantage might even accelerate in the future, for these are the same countries that are most likely to incorporate the next generation of robotics into society, work, and home. They will own the name brands in consumer robots, and they’ll power the software and networks that enable the robotics ecosystem. When I think about this symbiosis, I think about the Internet in the 1990s. It was not just the consumer-facing Internet companies that were born and based in Silicon Valley; it was also the network equipment makers like Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks. Today Cisco and Juniper have a combined 85,000 employees and $154 billion in market value. The same types of back-end systems will exist in the robotics industry. And the big five countries will benefit from being home to the high-paying jobs and wealth accumulation that go with being out ahead of the 191 other countries around the world. They will produce the Ciscos and Junipers of robotics.

Interestingly, less developed countries might be able to leapfrog technologies as they enter the robot landscape. Countries in Africa and Central Asia have been able to go straight to cell phones without building landline telephones, and in the same way they might be able to jump ahead in robotics without having to establish an advanced industrial base.

The African Robotics Network (AFRON) offers a good model. A community of individuals and institutions, AFRON hosts events and projects to boost robotics-related education, research, and industry on the continent. Through initiatives like its 10 Dollar Robot Challenge, AFRON encourages the development of extremely low-cost robotics education. One winner was RoboArm, a project from Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria whose armlike structure is made out of plastic and runs on scavenged motors. The ability to generate low-cost innovation based on scarcity of materials is rooted in the concept of frugal innovation.

As robotics starts to spread, the degree to which countries can succeed in the robot era will depend in part on culture—on how readily people accept robots into their lives. Western and Eastern cultures are highly differentiated in how they view robots. Not only does Japan have an economic need and the technological know-how for robots, but it also has a cultural predisposition. The ancient Shinto religion, practiced by 80 percent of Japanese, includes a belief in animism, which holds that both objects and human beings have spirits. As a result, Japanese culture tends to be more accepting of robot companions as actual companions than is Western culture, which views robots as soulless machines. In a culture where the inanimate can be considered to be just as alive as the animate, robots can be seen as members of society rather than as mere tools or as threats.

In contrast, fears of robotics are deeply seated in Western culture. The threat of humanity creating things we cannot control pervades Western literature, leaving a long history of cautionary tales. Prometheus was condemned to an eternity of punishment for giving fire to humans. When Icarus flew too high, the sun melted his ingenious waxed wings and he fell to his death. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein’s grotesque creation wreaks havoc and ultimately leads to its creator’s death—and numerous B-movie remakes.

This fear does not pervade Eastern culture to the same extent. The cultural dynamic in Japan is representative of the culture through much of East Asia, enabling the Asian robotics industry to speed ahead, unencumbered by cultural baggage. Investment in robots reflects a cultural comfort with robots, and, in China, departments of automation are well represented and well respected in the academy. There are more than 100 automation departments in Chinese universities, compared with approximately 76 in the United States despite the larger total number of universities in the United States.

In South Korea, teaching robots are seen in a positive light; in Europe, they are viewed negatively. As with eldercare, in Europe robots are seen as machines, whereas in Asia they are viewed as potential companions. In the United States, the question is largely avoided because of an immigration system that facilitates the entry of new, low-cost labor that often ends up in fields that might otherwise turn to service robots. In the other parts of the world, attitudes often split the difference. A recent study in the Middle East showed that people would be open to a humanoid household-cleaning robot but not to robots that perform more intimate and influential roles such as teaching. The combination of cultural, demographic, and technological factors means that we will get our first glimpse of a world full of robots in East Asia.

HUMANIZING ROBOTS

The first wave of labor substitution from automation and robotics came from jobs that were often dangerous, dirty, and dreary and involved little personal interaction, but increasingly, robots are encroaching on jobs in the service sector that require personalized skills. Jobs in the service sector that were largely immune from job loss during the last stage of globalization are now at risk because advances in robotics have accelerated in recent years, due to breakthroughs in the field itself as well as new advancements in information management, computing, and high-end engineering. Tasks once thought the exclusive domain of humans—the types of jobs that require situational awareness, spatial reasoning and dexterity, contextual understanding, and human judgment—are opening up to robots.

Two key developments have dovetailed to make this possible: improvements in modeling belief space and the uplink of robots to the cloud. Belief space refers to a mathematical framework that allows us to model a given environment statistically and develop probabilistic outcomes. It is basically the application of algorithms to make sense of new or messy contexts. For robots, modeling belief space opens the way for greater situational awareness. It has led to breakthroughs in areas like grasping, once a difficult robot task. Until recently belief space was far too complex to sufficiently compute, a task made all the more difficult by the limited sets of robot experience available to analyze. But advances in data analytics have combined with exponentially greater sets of experiential robot data to enable programmers to develop robots that can now intelligently interact with their environment.

The recent exponential growth of robot data is due largely to the development of cloud robotics, a term coined by Google researcher James Kuffner in 2010. Linked to the cloud, robots can access vast troves of data and shared experience to enhance the understanding of their own belief space. Before being hooked up to the cloud, robots had access to very limited data—either their own experience or that of a narrow cluster of robots. They were stand-alone pieces of electronics with capabilities that were limited to the hardware and software inside the unit. But by becoming networked devices, constantly connected to the cloud, robots can now incorporate the experiences of every other robot of their kind, “learning” at an accelerating rate.

Imagine the kind of quantum leap that human culture would undertake if we were all suddenly given a direct link to the knowledge and experience of everyone else on the planet—if, when we made a decision, we were drawing from not just our own limited experience and expertise but from that of billions of other people. Big data has enabled this quantum leap for the cognitive development of robots.

With a connection to the cloud, robots can now incorporate the experiences of every other robot of their kind, “learning” at an accelerating rate.

Another major development in robotics arrives through materials science, which has allowed robots to be constructed of new materials. Robots no longer have to be cased in the aluminum bodies of armor that characterized C-3PO or R2-D2. Today’s robots can have bodies made of silicone, or even spider silk, that are eerily natural looking. Highly flexible components—such as air muscles (which distribute power through tubes holding highly concentrated pressurized air), electroactive polymers (which change a robot’s size and shape when stimulated by an electric field), and ferrofluids (basically magnetic fluids that facilitate more humanlike movement)—have created robots that you might not even recognize as being artificial, almost like the Arnold Schwarzenegger cyborg in The Terminator. An imitation caterpillar robot designed by researchers at Tufts University to perform tasks as varied as finding land mines and diagnosing diseases is even biodegradable—just like us.

Robots are now also being built both bigger and smaller than ever before. Nanorobots, still in the early phases of development, promise a future in which autonomous machines at the scale of 10-9 meters (far, far smaller than a grain of sand) can diagnose and treat human diseases at the cellular level. On the other end of the spectrum, the world’s largest walking robot is a German-made fire-breathing dragon that stands at 51 feet long, weighs 11 tons, and is filled with more than 20 gallons of stage blood. Apparently the Germans have a festival involving it.

Recent advances will continue. It is not just Japan’s government that is devoting ever-increasing resources to robotics. In the United States, President Obama launched the National Robotics Initiative in 2011 to stimulate development of robots for industrial automation, elder assistance, and military applications. Run by the National Science Foundation, the program has awarded more than $100 million in contracts. France has initiated a similar program, pledging $126.9 million to develop its industry and catch up to Germany. Sweden has similarly earmarked millions to give out to individuals and corporations through innovation awards such as Robotdalen (“robot valley”), launched in 2011.

The field of robotics is very much like where the world stood with the Internet 20 years ago. We are at the beginning of something: chapter one, page one.

The private sector is also investing at increasingly higher levels. Google purchased Boston Dynamics, a leading robotics design company with Pentagon contracts, for an untold sum in December 2013. It also bought DeepMind, a London-based artificial intelligence company founded by wunderkind Demis Hassabis. As a kid, Hassabis was the second-highest-ranked chess player in the world under the age of 14, and while he was getting his PhD in cognitive neuroscience, he was acknowledged by Science magazine for making one of the ten most important science breakthroughs of the year after developing a new biological theory for how imagination and memory work in the brain.

At DeepMind, Demis and his colleagues effectively created the computer equivalent of hand-eye coordination, something that had never been accomplished before in robotics. In a demo, Demis showed me how he had taught his computers how to play old Atari 2600 video games in the same way that humans play them, based on looking at a screen and adjusting actions through neural processes responding to an opponent’s actions. He’d taught computers how to think in much the way that humans do. Then Google bought DeepMind for half a billion dollars and is applying its expertise in machine learning and systems neuroscience to power the algorithms it is developing as it expands beyond Internet search and further into robotics.

Most corporate research and development in robotics comes from within big companies (like Google, Toyota, and Honda), but venture capital funding in robotics is growing at a steep rate. It more than doubled in just three years, from $160 million in 2011 to $341 million in 2014. In its first year of investment, Grishin Robotics, a $25 million seed investment fund, evaluated more than 600 start-ups before coming to terms with the eight now in its portfolio. Singulariteam, a new Israeli venture capital fund, quickly raised two funds of $100 million each to invest in early-stage robotics and artificial intelligence. The appeal for investors is obvious: the market for consumer robots could hit $390 billion by 2017, and industrial robots should hit $40 billion in 2020.

As the technology continues to improve, there is an ongoing debate about just how radically human life will be transformed by advanced robots and whether robots will ultimately surpass us. One view in the debate is that it’s inevitable robots will pass us; another is that they can’t possibly compete with us; a third is that man and machine could merge. Within the robotics community, the future of technology is wrapped up in the concept of singularity, the theoretical point in time when artificial intelligence will match or surpass human intelligence. If singularity is achieved, it is unclear what the relationship between robots and humans will become. (In the Terminator series, once singularity is achieved, a self-aware computer system decides to launch a war on humans.)

Enthusiasts for the singularity imagine that investments in robotics will do more than strengthen corporate balance sheets; they will radically enhance human well-being, eliminating mundane tasks and replacing diseased or aging parts of our bodies. The technology community is deeply divided about whether singularity is a good thing or a bad thing, with one camp believing it will enhance human experience as another camp, equally large, believes it will unleash a dystopian future where people become subservient to machines.

But will singularity occur?

Those who believe that singularity will be achieved point to several key factors. First, they argue that Moore’s law, which holds that the amount of computing power we can fit into a chip will double every two years, shows little sign of slowing down. Moore’s law applies to the transistors and technology that control robots as well as those in computers. Add rapid advances in machine learning, data analytics, and cloud robotics, and it’s clear that computing is going to keep rapidly improving. Those who argue for the singularity differ on when it will occur. Mathematician Vernor Vinge predicts that it will occur by 2023; futurist Ray Kurzweil says 2045. But the question looming over singularity is whether there’s a limit on how far our technology can ultimately go.

Those who argue against the possibility of singularity point to several factors. The software advances necessary to reach singularity demand a detailed scientific understanding of the human brain, but our lack of understanding about the basic neural structure of the brain impedes software development. Moreover, while weak artificial intelligence, whereby robots simply specialize in a specific function, is currently advancing exponentially, strong artificial intelligence, whereby robots demonstrate humanlike cognition and intelligence, is advancing only linearly. While inventions like IBM’s Watson (the computer designed by IBM that beat Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter) are exciting, scientists need a better understanding of the brain before these advances progress beyond winning a game show. Watson didn’t actually “think”; it was basically a very comprehensive search engine querying a large database. As robotics expert and UC Berkeley professor Ken Goldberg explains, “Robots are going to become increasingly human. But the gap between humans and robots will remain—it’s so large that it will be with us for the foreseeable future.”

It’s my view that the current moment in the field of robotics is very much like where the world stood with the Internet 20 years ago. We are at the beginning of something: chapter one, page one. Just as it would have been difficult in the days of dial-up modems to imagine an Internet video service like YouTube streaming over 6 billion hours of video every month, it is difficult for us to imagine today that lifelike robots may walk the streets with us, work in the cubicle next to ours, or take our elderly parents for a walk and then help them with dinner.

This is not happening today and it will not happen tomorrow, but it will happen during most of our lifetimes. The level of investment in robotics, combined with advances in big data, network technologies, materials science, and artificial intelligence, are setting the foundation for the 2020s to produce breakthroughs in robotics that bring today’s science fiction right into mainstream use.

Alec Ross is the New York Times bestselling author of The Industries of the Future, recently released by Simon & Schuster.  You can read more here.