Publication details
To nejlepší tady jsi TY! Roboti a jiné drahé hračky v pozdní dospělosti/
| Title in English | The best thing here is YOU! The robots and "expensive toys" of later life stage |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | The unprecedented ageing of the world's populations is considered one of the greatest challenges of the future. Concerns are directed primarily towards the financial costs of changing demographics and the inadequate provision of care for ageing individuals. One source of solutions is the field of advanced technology, artificial intelligence and robotics, which could help both to compensate for the expected decline in labour productivity and to replace the missing caregivers. However, bridging the problem of ageing populations with technological solutions leads across a relatively deep chasm of social externalities. The solutions sought and proposed move between the dualities of youth and old age, maturity and backwardness, activity and passivity, categories of 'us' vs. 'them', and reveal some of the contested notions of old age and ageing in contemporary societies. Our discussion in this paper is based on the interim results of the applied project "HUMR: The use of a humanoid robot for active ageing in older men and women" (TL02000362), which seeks to explore the potential of using modern robotic hardware and software to bridge the technological gap for contemporary elderly people in a community (group) context. Discussed in the paper will be the whitespaces in the conception of active ageing revealed through 'human-robot-interaction (HRI)', in particular the absence of play and humour; the gendered approaches to technology in later life and the scales of relationality of HRI; and, last but not least, the limits of the promise of technological solutions to the problems of ageing societies. |
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