there is this danger that if you just see care as a series of individual tasks, you just

have this really flattened vision or view of what care is where all of the meanings,

motivations, you know, values attached to care are just erased and you end up with just a series of physical actions or speech

actions and care workers and care recipients are just reduced to kind of two-dimensional characters. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

And this week my guest is James Wright.

James is the author of Robots Won't Save Japan and a research associate at the Turing Institute.

He's also a visiting lecturer at Queen Mary University of London.

Before we get into this week's episode, just a quick update. If you are in New Zealand,

I will be there starting this week as you listen to this. I'll be doing some events around the

country. So on March 17th, I will be in Auckland. March 21st, I'll be doing some events around the country. So on March 17th, I will be in

Auckland. March 21st, I'll be doing an event in Dunedin, March 22nd in Christchurch, March 28th in

Wellington. And then once again, I'll be back in Auckland on March 30th for another event, which

will be in the evening, because the earlier one will be in the afternoon. So if you are in New Zealand,

feel free to come out and see me while I'm in the country. You can find more information on the

events in these show notes. Now, I really wanted to have James on the show because when I saw that

he had written a book about robots in Japan, and in particular, robots in elder care in Japan,

you know, my mind immediately flashed back to the mid-2010s

when we were having all of these discussions about how automation was going to eliminate all these

jobs and it was going to hit so many sectors of the economy and all of these drivers were going to

lose their jobs to self-driving cars. And one of the other kind of major industries that were being talked about at that point was how you know care workers were going to lose jobs to all these robots in care homes and other kind of care professions things like the pepper robot or robert which was going to kind of lift up elderly people and all these other robots that were proposed for, you know, various

sectors of the economy, basically. And what we all know is that that never really came to pass.

And so I was really interested in digging into this further with James to understand, you know,

...