What Happened After the Robots Arrived

Sixteen articles into covering care robots, Tugboat still had no answer to the question underneath all of them. Every study we could find measured willingness, because willingness is what a survey can reach. Nobody had looked at what happens to the people already doing the work once the machines show up.

Japan has been running that experiment longer than anywhere else, and economists from Stanford, the University of Tokyo and Notre Dame went and looked at the nursing homes that adopted robots. The result, published on August 6, is the opposite of what everyone braces for. Employment went up. Care worker headcount rose about 28 percent, nurses about 39 percent, total facility staffing about 26 percent. Those homes also saw a real drop in retention problems, which for a family is the number that matters most, because turnover is what you feel at the bedside.

Then there is the part that belongs in the same breath. Almost all of that growth was in nonregular positions, the flexible and often part-time contracts. The robots did not take the jobs. They changed what kind of job was on offer.

Both halves are true and a family should hold both. If your mother is in a home that brought in lifting equipment, the likely result is more people around her and fewer of them leaving, and that is a genuinely good thing to hope for. If your daughter is the one taking the aide job, the likely result is a shift rather than a career.

The acceptance studies asked whether we would let the robots in. This one asked what they did once they were, and the answer is not a verdict. It is a trade, and the people who take the trade are not the people who buy the machine.