‘I tech care': The responsibility to provide healthcare using robots

Robots are an emerging technology in many areas such as military engineering, logistic services, and autonomous vehicles. One of the most promising areas of their implementation is human care. Healthcare robots have not yet been commercialized but evidence suggests that their future use will be substantial and challenging. In this contribution my aim is 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 value only this sense of care, in a future rendered increasingly 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.