Via The Register:

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has ordered extensive trials of intelligent aged care robots.

The Ministry’s announcement notes that China’s population is ageing, and families are therefore increasingly called on to care for their elders due to a shortage of aged care workers.

Beijing wants to know if robots can help, so it has called for applicants to participate in trials…

And the first thing I thought of wasn’t how much harrm a glitchy bot could do to a frail old body, or the potential surveillance and control applications (because why else does the Chinese government support anything?) or the dehumanizing idea of fobbing off elderly relatives to droids. As a longtime Techdirt reader, my first thought was: what happens when the cloud service providing the bots’ pseudo-intelligence goes down?

It might be an outage of a few hours or days or a corp goiong out of business and taking its servers with it, but from the elderly users’ perspective, the difference is merely one of degree. If users couldn’t feed themselves without the bots’ help, now they can’t eat. If they needed the bots’ help to get around their homes, now they can’t move, and there’s at least some chance that they can’t call for help. And to add insult to injury, if they’re so isolated that they needed the bots’ LLM facsimile of companionship, then they’re going to feel even more alone as they lie helpless in their own excrement, slowly getting weaker…