And that's as real as humans, isn't it?

We humans weren’t ready for the novel coronavirus and neither are the machines.The pandemic has come at an awkward time where anything but robots have come to the rescue of the corona patients. Ever more sophisticated robots and AI are augmenting human workers, rather than replacing them entirely.

 

While it would be nice if the machines could protect doctors and nurses by turning more tasks over to robots, medicine is particularly hard to automate. It’s fundamentally human, requiring fine motor skills, compassion, and quick life-and-death decisionmaking we wouldn’t want to leave to machines.

 

 

Definitely, robots enable a form of telemedicine that is capable to keep humans out of areas of contagion. But a cruel irony or whatever you note is that the medical professionals are likely to know better than anyone, especially the automated machines and yet are getting replaced to serve self lives.

 

Still, it's hard-pressed to find a more sensitive interaction between humans than the doctor-patient relationship, and this has remained a thorny problem in hospital robotics. A doctor has to keep people alive, but also keep them well, empathizing in a particularly difficult time. Robots don’t do empathy, do they?

 

How well a robot can tackle a health worker’s task depends, in some measure, on whether it’s replacing that human interaction, or simply channeling it. We live in India where one to one interaction matters the most and it is the root to the cultural exchange. Is Robot capable of doing it is another question to wonder on!

 

As a pandemic grips the world, a person could be forgiven if they had forgotten about another threat to humanity's way of life - the rise of robots. For better or worse the robots are going to replace many humans in their jobs and the coronavirus outbreak is speeding up the process.

 

Robot sceptics had believed humans would have an edge in these jobs. That could be changing as lockdowns have made humans more comfortable with the idea of connecting remotely. The instructor or adviser on the screen doesn't need to be a real person, it just needs to think and act like one. But one question to sum up, are we ready and prepared enough to lead our lives like this? Forever?