Automating Care

Films like Subservience and M3gan, and to some extent even Her, highlight the direction in which automation is heading; that is, in the direction of care. It’s not just administration, manual labour, and, more recently, all the jobs that ChatGPT made obsolete, but also hospice work and emotional support in general, that machines are encroaching upon — and furthermore, it might be necessary.

As populations continue to age and shrink, there is expected to be a dramatic decrease in the available labour force. As Goodhart and Pradhan write in The Great Demographic Reversal, ‘the basic problem [that we face] is that ageing is going to require increasing amounts of labour to be redirected towards elderly care at exactly the time that the labour force starts shrinking’. At the moment, the shortages are mitigated by migrant workers, which is why governments talk tough about immigration but tend to turn a blind eye to it in reality:

Despite anti-immigration rhetoric and massive investments in border enforcement, governments have largely tolerated this, just as they have turned a blind eye to the illegal deployment of undocumented workers, as they fill urgent labour shortages in sectors such as agriculture, construction, domestic work, hospitality, and child and elder care (Haas).

But the idea that immigration can solve the demographic collapse that’s predicted is not borne…