Artificial intelligence already dominates many professional activities. But will she soon be able to massage, hug or comfort us? Or: Why care work is becoming a luxury good.
Robots are often superior to us, but they cannot take care of us.
The hotel lobby in the small Swedish town almost 400 kilometers below the Arctic Circle was as inviting as the fireplace projected on the wall was warm: it was up to the guest to ensure comfort. As for almost everything else. A few sofas were grouped around the bar, which consisted of a drinks and snack machine. The guest welcomed himself at the reception desk and dutifully joined the queue for breakfast to make his coffee, boil his egg and toast his bread.
Only the small sauna was manned. It was the heart of the hotel, the only place that was cleaned and decorated daily. The sauna had windows and fresh towels, and it was always full. People had to get warm somewhere when it's cold for 24 hours and pitch dark for 20 hours. And because you can program the temperature of the oven, but it still requires two skilled hands for massage and infusion, the guest in the sauna was still a guest and was served.
What's more: the spa was the last space for interpersonal interactions in the digitalized hotel world. There the people who were usually dressed in fine clothes were sitting naked and defenseless on the wooden benches, sweating and talking to each other, lined up like birds that had not flown south. The masseur, who also acted as a sauna master, was able to briefly mention the names of the guests, but remained politely distant – he mastered the art of establishing a relationship where there was no relationship, of remaining strange and at the same time getting on people's nerves. Not a service that can be easily translated into zeros and ones.
Is working on the boundaries of intimacy perhaps the last bastion before artificial intelligence?
It was in 2003 when the famous American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, who wrote the standard work on care work that is still valid today, described how the “commercialization of intimacy” was turning what was once female care work into a paid service.
Now her former doctoral student Allison Pugh, who now holds the chair of sociology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has examined what is happening to care work in the age of digitalization. For her recently published book “The Last Human Job”, Pugh accompanied and interviewed pastors, nurses, psychologists, doctors and teachers for five years – people who do what she calls “bonding work” because their job requires an emotional understanding of the Opposite required. They wanted to know to what extent technology has influenced their work and found that all of the professions surveyed struggle with standardization to increase efficiency. This is no coincidence: bonding work is difficult to break down into individual steps, objectify and standardize. Is talking to the patient during dressing changes important for wound healing? And how do you measure success when it comes to providing comfort?
According to Pugh, this question is not answered satisfactorily in any of the professional fields examined, but all of them suffer from the attempt to technologically standardize their work, which ultimately leads to dissatisfied general practitioners, unhappy patients, frustrated teachers and left-behind students. And to AI programs that take over the work integrally, such as learning apps in the classroom or chatbots as substitute therapists.
Of course, one can argue that learning assistance and therapy through artificial intelligence is better than no assistance at all. Ultimately, there is a shortage of staff in many care professions. But, according to Pugh, this makes care from a human more and more a luxury item. Touchscreens for the rabble, service for the upper class? The fact is that expensive private schools already advertise small school classes, and luxury retirement homes or daycare centers boast a good childcare ratio.
Relationships are not just a nice side effect; they are a prerequisite for the successful practice of this profession. It is not for nothing that research has yet to find anything that has a greater influence on students' learning success than their relationship with the teacher. And everyone knows how healing being close to a loved one can be when you feel sick and miserable.
But relationships can hardly be digitized. They value empathy. And machines can't feel. Although artificial intelligence can produce empathetic sentences, studies show that simulated compassion leaves people cold. Just as cold as an artificial fire makes the guest in a hotel.
Nicole Althaus is an author and columnist for “NZZ am Sonntag”.
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