Robot cleaners will lead to cuts in human contact in care homes and social care services

A Guardian article about robots to do the cleaning in care homes in Denmark sounds like a good idea. the person promoting the idea (which is presented a bit cautiously by the Guardian) suggests it means that staff have more time to give to interpersonal relationships with residents. But the rest of the article is about worries about Danish cuts in the social services.

Which suggests to me that it will be a bit like having computers supplied to social workers over the last 20 years. Claims that it will lead to a reduction n paperwork proved to be nonsense. It just meant that the social workers had to do all the administrative work that was previously done by clerical workers. This led to extra stress for social workers and time taken from working with people and passed across to working with computers. It also led to cuts in the availability of routine clerical jobs for people with ordinary qualifications.

Robot cleaners will be the same.  Once they're efficient and cheap, they will be used to cut routine staff from care homes, who provide a bit of extra humanity and human contact. And eventually they'll be handed out to older people in their own homes, so they will lose one of the little bits of human contact that they get from people doing their housework. And of course they'll also have to buy them or contribute to the cost, and won't have the alternative of opting for a human being, because that will be more expensive than a robot. And then, nobody will have a list of human cleaners, so the possibility will be lost anyway.

Link to the Guardian article.