As mentioned earlier in my research proposal, Japan is one of the countries actively exploring the field of using A.I robotics to tackle the aging population. They have created different types of robotic companions such as a robotic seal, a bear carebot, and robotic nurses. However there are still some moral issues with having robotic companions.
Take the robotic seals for an example. The robotic seals comfort dementia patients ,but raises ethical concerns. The seal is not alive,and is just a robot called Paro, but the senior patients who have dementia or similar loss of cognitive function do not know. It is a type of tool known as a "carebot". In a KALW online article, the authors compares Paro to therapy dogs that go to hospitals, and states that it does not matter whether Paro is real or not in the long run as "humans are wired for connection". As Dr. Geoffrey Lane, the psychologist who brought Paro to the Livermore hospital asserts, "There's a pretty large body of evidence to show that interacting with animals can help things like lower blood pressure, reduce depression, reduce subjective pain, decrease the time it takes to recover from chronic ailments".
On the other hand, Shannon Vallor, an ethicist and philosophy professor at Santa Clara University thinks otherwise. She thinks that there are a few ethical issues to worry about when using carebots. Nurses and therapists at the Livermore V.A does not explicitly tell patients that Paro the seal is a robot, instead they play along with questions as if Paro is real. It just seems unfair for the dementia patients whose line between reality and imagination are already blurred. There's also another problem, and it has to do with us, the people who are actually doing the caring. As Shannon Vallor said "What happens to our moral character and our virtues in a world where we increasingly have more and more opportunities to transfer our responsibilities for caring for others, to robots? And where the quality of those robots increasingly encourages us to feel more comfortable with doing this, to feel less guilty about it, to feel in fact maybe like that's the best way that we can care for our loved ones?" I think she has a good point. It is helping therapists do their job better, and also helping the patients, but at the same time, it's the ethical concern that we are pushing our responsibilities onto robots.
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