Caregiving, Carebots, and Contagion

Caring robots have lifesaving benefits during contagion, but they also pose a threat to interpersonal engagement and genuine human caregiving. They can perform lifesaving tasks, safeguard vulnerable persons, and relieve caregivers of certain burdens, but they cannot replace human caring. Carebots are a dangerous lure in a culture that settles for substitutes and venerates the screen, and the challenge lies in how we relate to them. Caring is a fundamentally human act and lies at the heart of ethics, and we have a binding moral responsibility to care for the Other.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 174 pages
Publication date: 31 January 2024
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Would you want to be cared for by a robot? Michael C. Brannigan's Caregiving, Carebots, and Contagion explores the benefits of caring robots, particularly during contagion, while examining the threat they pose to interpersonal engagement and genuine human caregiving. As our COVID-19 pandemic continues, caring robots will join our nursing and healthcare frontlines. Carebots can perform lifesaving tasks to minimize infection, safeguard vulnerable persons, and relieve caregivers of certain burdens. They also raise profound moral and existential questions: What is caring? How will we relate with each other? What does it mean to be human? Brannigan underscores the hands-on benefits of carebots, but also warns us of the perils they pose. They can be a dangerous lure in a culture that settles for substitutes and venerates the screen. Alerting us to the threatening prospect of carebots becoming our surrogate for interpersonal connection, he maintains that they are not the culprits. The challenge lies in how we relate to them. While they beneficially complement our caregiving, carebots cannot replace human caring. Caring is a fundamentally human act and lies at the heart of ethics. As humans, we have a binding moral responsibility to care for the Other, and genuine caring demands our embodied, human-to-human presence.

Weight: 268g
Dimension: 229 x 150 x 13 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781793649201