Many
aspects of our lives are changing as a result of the Corona virus. One important aspect is health care. When a doctor has to see a patient and when
Zoom technology or something similar is not adequate for making a diagnosis or
treating the patient, there is a push to use robots as the medical
interface. The idea nowadays is that a
robot can’t contract or pass along Covid 19.
Up until recently, robots in hospitals have been used either for
precision surgeries or for basic routine tasks.
But now the idea is to use medical robots much the same as robots are
used to clean up accidents at nuclear power plants. They are to be used to prevent human beings
from being exposed to dangerous elements in the person’s living
environments. Instead of radiation,
medical robots will prevent people from being exposed to potential cases of
Covid 19. And so for the time being,
robots will become our physical health care providers.
And
if this were to last for the duration of the Corona virus pandemic, it wouldn’t
bother me quite so much. But there are
people in the health care field who would like to see the change become permanent. Robots don’t get tired like
humans do. Robots don’t make mistakes in
surgery like humans do. And robots don’t
require costly salaries like humans do.
Robots are expensive to purchase, but that’s basically it. I don’t know if the use of robots will
totally eliminate the role of humans as health care providers, but if the trend
is sustained, it will certainly diminish the role humans play. And this means a very different experience of
medicine for patients who go to health care offices, clinics and hospitals.
So
what is wrong with this trend? It
assumes that healing is totally based on linear procedure. That is diagnosis, doling out medicine,
surgery, rehabilitation and, of course, hospital cleaning and maintenance. It assumes that healing is a mechanistic
process based on the defined discrete stimuli of focused actions. It leaves out the very important ongoing
emotional support given to the patient by doctors and nurses and receptionists
and all the people in hospitals who perform the tasks of delivering food and
other supplies to the patient as well as those who clean the hospitals. As someone who has worked as a medical
Spanish interpreter for a long time, I can tell you that the social skills of
all the people connected in some way to the healing profession are just as
important in helping the patient heal as the practical skills. A patient not only needs the defined discrete
stimulation related to focused practical skills in order to heal. He also needs the flowing blendable continual
stimulation from social skills and emotional commitment.
A
medical environment filled with mechanistic practical procedures and nothing
else will put a patient in an experiential vacuum where he will experience
intense numbness. And that intense
numbness will interfere with the organic healing a patient needs in order to
pull out of his illness or medical condition.
In other words, for most people healing is a social situation requiring
the emotional support of the people around him.
Smiles, encouraging words, the exploration of complex and serious
medical situations in words that a patient can understand. For children, the ability to be playful,
funny and comforting. For all patients,
the ability to convey hope when hope is possible and the ability to convey in
as gentle a way as possible when there is no hope.
Some
level of emotional bonding with a human health care provider is an intrinsic
part of the healing process. Emotional
bonding is like a psychological nutrient, the psychological equivalent of
taking vitamins or Omega 3 capsules. If
we reduce the presence of human health care providers in medicine, we are
leaving a patient open to forms of both psychological and physical numbness and
to diminished probabilities of getting well.
There
is something subtly insidious about having human health care providers replaced
by robots. Not only do robots create an
experiential vacuum for patients leading to numbness and preventing a patient
from harnessing his inner resources to help him heal. There is also the
situation that humans and robots blur into each other in the mind of the
patient. Not only do robots increasingly
present themselves as humans, but humans, including the patient himself,
increasingly are perceived as having robotic qualities. When one has to interact with robots in such
emotion-laden circumstances as health care providers, it numbs one’s capacity
to emotionally bond with other people who are now minimally differentiated from
elaborate machines in the patient’s mind.
So perhaps the defined discrete medical condition is properly diagnosed
and fixed or cured by the robot, but a larger more nebulous flowing blendable
continual negative psychological condition is created or at least contributed
to. This is a perfect example of losing
the larger forest in order to save the individual tree.
Unfortunately,
this kind of situation is occurring not just in medicine, but in many other
areas of life as well. Covid 19, with
its requirements of social distancing, is going to make it seem safer to people
to people to have to deal with robots in work situations, because robots can’t
contract or pass on the virus. We are
all paying the price that has resulted from certain people consuming certain
wild animals for an unnatural boost in certain kinds of organic stimulation. The wrong kind of natural experience.
Yet
if we want to truly maintain our humanity, we must be conscious of this danger
and cultivate our bonds with people as much as possible. There are those in our society who have seen
Covid 19 as a neat excuse to compose a robot vision of the world that they were
eager to compose anyway. And it extends
to robot caretakers for children as was discussed in a previous article. If as a result of the mirroring and modeling
that occurs with parental figures and caretakers, the child with a robot
caretaker loses sight of the boundaries that separate humans and robots, then
the human race will totally undifferentiated itself and reduce itself to
machines.
Do we
really want to give up our sense of agency over our lives? That is what is in the process of happening,
as we allow robots to take over more and more tasks and activities. With the defined discrete behavior of robots,
goals are reached in a bland flavorless way.
The flavor that is lost with robots is the flowing blendable continual
stimulation that makes life so vibrant for humans. Perhaps robots help one to get from all the
smaller point a’s to all the smaller point b’s in a smooth efficient precise
way. But the life-giving properties of
an organic coherent journey are lost.
Robotic efficiency turns life ultimately into a living death. What is certainly the opposite of what we
want if we are using medical robots to save lives. But we are saving lives without the life.
© 2020 Laurence Mesirow
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