“I Tech Care”: How Healthcare Robotics Can Change the Future of Love, Solidarity, and Responsibility

This paper is a continuation of a previous work where I argued that social expectations driving researches and developments in care robotics are not based on the simplistic optimism in a new commercial artifact but, involve a meaningful transformation of two rational features of human reality – ontology and normativity. In this paper my aim is to take a step forwards by investigating the kind of care relationship that could exist between a robot and a human. Usually, we take care of things and people because we love them, or else we want to give them support in their suffering. However, continuing to only value this sense of care, in a future rendered increasingly transparent and abstract by technology, may mean losing sight of the fact that taking care of others also means taking care of ourselves. If we completely entrust robots with the role of caring, the bigger concern is not the foreseeable decrease in the “humanity” in healthcare contexts, but the much more challenging notion of people surrendering the value and meaning in their lives. Since caring about something means, firstly, giving it value, a society passively nursed by technology is a society unable to give value to things and people. In order to avoid this risk, new approaches are required, no longer based on love or solidarity, but responsibility. I have named this approach “I tech care” and this paper aims to provide a general overview of the main concepts involved.