We Funded the Bed, Not the Nurse. Now We’re Being Asked to Fund the Robot.
There was a stretch of years in this country when the way to get more money into an aged care home was to fit another bed into the room. Not another nurse. Not another meal. Another bed.
Through the 1970s and 1980s the Australian government subsidised beds. If you ran a facility with thirty-four beds and you could work another six into the same floor space, the subsidy followed the beds. Nobody asked whether you had put on more nursing staff. Nobody asked what was on the plate at six o’clock. The test was a bed, a blanket and a pillow, and the money arrived.
That is not really a story about greed. It is a story about measurement. We built a funding model around the one thing that was easy to count, and we got precisely what we counted.
I raise it now because we are close to making the same kind of decision again, and this time the countable object is a robot.
You can listen to the full segment with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew below:
Where the conversation actually went
Phil Whelan and I spent close to half an hour on this yesterday morning, which is a long stretch for a radio segment and longer than either of us had planned. We ran through the news bulletin and came back for more. I had published a piece a few hours earlier splitting robots in aged care into three buckets: cleaning, monitoring and companionship. If you want that argument in full, it is in Robots Are Already Working in Australian Aged Care. The short version is that cleaning is settled, monitoring earns its place, and companionship is the one worth arguing about, because a machine sitting with someone is not assisting the relationship. It is occupying it.
Phil did not stay on the buckets. He kept circling something else, in three or four different forms, and by the end of the segment it was clear he had found the harder question. Who pays for these things. Who decides. And what happens when nobody is watching the machine that is watching your mother.
I answered him at the time in the way you answer on live radio, which is quickly. It has been sitting with me since, and the answer deserves more room than a bulletin break allowed.
The question underneath the robot question
At one point Phil asked whether these devices should be funded the way a prescription is funded. I said that in some cases I would argue yes. He came straight back with the sharper version: what is the argument for no?
My answer on air was that it is expensive, and that there is a monitoring problem sitting behind it. Who watches the machine. Can we trust what it reports. That answer was correct as far as it went, and it was incomplete.
The real argument for no is that we have run this experiment before, and it is still in the building.
When you fund an object, you get objects. When you fund a bed, you get beds crammed into rooms. A robot is an object. It is easier to count than a bed, it photographs beautifully in an annual report, and it can be depreciated. Whatever funding instrument gets built around it will attach to the unit, because the unit is the thing that can be verified. And a facility with eleven companion devices will be able to demonstrate compliance faster than a facility with one more registered nurse on the overnight shift.
That is the shape of the mistake. It is not that robots do not belong in aged care. Plenty of them already do useful work and I said so on air. It is that we are about to build a payment system around the presence of a device, when the thing we actually want to buy is a minute of human attention that the device was supposed to free up.
Nobody in the 1970s set out to fund overcrowding either.
What the numbers actually say
Around 1.35 million Australians currently access some form of aged care, out of a population of roughly 27 million. That is not all residential care. It includes in-home support, someone who cannot cook for themselves any more, someone who is frail rather than ill. It is the whole spectrum of no longer being able to look after yourself the way you once could. That number goes one direction from here.
The workforce goes the other. The Committee for Economic Development of Australia has put the direct aged care workforce shortfall at 110,000 within this decade, rising past 400,000 by 2050 if nothing changes. Those are not soft numbers and they have been public for years.
Then there is what the sector is still carrying. The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety reported in March 2021 and found that one in three people in residential and home care had experienced substandard care. Its final report ran to seven volumes and it still reverberates through this sector as though it landed ten minutes ago. Nutrition is the part I keep coming back to, because it is the most basic thing an institution can get right. A Melbourne study cited in that inquiry found 68 per cent of residents were malnourished or at risk of it. A larger and more recent study across three states found four in ten residents malnourished.
Now set the robot market against that. Global eldercare robotics was worth around 3.4 billion US dollars last year and is climbing at double digits. Andromeda Robotics, a Melbourne company founded by a University of Melbourne mechatronics graduate who was twenty-two at the time, has raised 23 million US dollars for a companion device called Abi that is already in Australian homes. The providers using it are not running quiet pilots. Their chief executives are on the record saying it lifts residents’ mood and engagement.
Two of those numbers are about capital. One is about food. That gap is the whole argument.
The people who will pay for this are not who you think
Phil asked me which age group is paying the price for what has gone wrong in this sector. I said it is not really an age group. It is a band.
At the top end, aged care in Australia works. You can buy into a residential apartment for upwards of a million dollars, and you are not buying real estate. You are buying occupancy. In most arrangements you sell it back to the operator when you stop using it, and you pay ongoing fees the whole time. It is expensive and it is not straightforward, but the people who can reach it will be looked after. Those places have real brands to protect and mostly they protect them.
At the very bottom there is a safety net. It is thin, it is stretched, and it is not what any of us would choose, but it exists.
The band in the middle is where the damage lands. A pension that covers part of a facility and not all of it. An operator who takes the pension and then asks for more. A family deciding how much of its own future it is willing to spend, and how much of one person’s remaining time is worth a second mortgage. Most Australians are in that band. Most Australians do not know it yet.
So when the question of funding companion robots reaches a policy desk, understand who the answer is really for. The top end will buy whatever it wants regardless. The middle band gets whatever the subsidy makes cheapest. If the subsidy attaches to the device and not to the hour of care, then the middle band is the group that receives a machine in place of a person, and receives it first.
Money is already pouring into ageing. Just not into care
Somewhere in the middle of the segment Phil turned the conversation sideways and asked how much technology is making ageing itself less of a thing. That is gerontology, and in the last decade it has gone from a field of study to an industry.
It got there because a small number of very wealthy people decided they did not want to age. One of Alphabet’s own companies exists more or less for this purpose. Hundreds of millions of dollars a year are going into understanding why we deteriorate and how to slow it down. I have called that the selfish gene at work, and I do not think it is a bad thing. The research is real and the benefits will eventually reach people who could never fund it themselves.
But hold the two facts next to each other for a second, because this is the ripple effect nobody wants to name.
We can find hundreds of millions of dollars to extend the number of years a person lives. We cannot find enough people to sit with them during those years. We are funding the extension of life at one end and running out of humans at the other. The gap between those two projects is not a technology problem. It is a values problem wearing a budget’s clothing.
The word that gives it away
I used the word “industry” on air and then apologised for it, which I do most times I say it. It irritates me every time, and it is what the sector is called, and that is exactly its problem.
Aged care work in Australia is culturally read as something people fell into. Say you are an aged care worker at a barbecue and a certain number of people quietly conclude you could not get another job. That is not true, and the pay structure has spent thirty years suggesting otherwise. It is the same thing we have done to teaching, which is the most honourable work a person can do and is not valued or paid as though it is.
This matters more than it sounds, and here is where it lands for anyone running an organisation. If the relational part of a carer’s job gets automated, and the relational part is the bit that makes the job bearable, what is left is lifting, showering, medication rounds and paperwork. You have then removed the reason people stay in a role you already cannot recruit for.
Read that sequence again, because it runs backwards to the assumption. Everyone expects the physical work to be automated first. It will not be. Lifting a frail human being safely is genuinely difficult to build. Sitting with someone and being pleasant company is cheap to fake. So the easy thing arrives first, and the easy thing happens to be the part of the job that people came for.
Does it need to look like us
Phil pushed on appearance, and it is a better question than it first sounds. If the human brain responds to a human-looking thing, why not simply build a human-looking thing?
There are two camps in robotics and they have been arguing for years. One says anthropomorphic design is the point, because it is what triggers connection. The other says absolutely not, because we should never confuse one category with the other. I have written about that split before in Why Robots Don’t Need to Be Like Us, and I have not changed my position: it depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve.
If you want stimulation, conversation, participation, then something human-shaped works, and Abi sits in that space. You know it is a robot. It is a bit silly and a bit fun and that is part of the design.
If the person has advanced dementia, that same device could frighten them. A plush seal that responds to being stroked, the sort of thing I first saw around fifteen years ago and wrote about back when this question was still theoretical in Forget Walkies in the Park, is more comforting precisely because it does not pretend. Nothing here is for everybody. The moment a procurement process treats one device as the answer for a whole floor, it has already gone wrong.
The failure that is coming, and it is not technical
Near the end of the segment I said something I have been circling for a while. The next thing that goes badly wrong in this sector will not be a robot malfunctioning.
It will be a family discovering, after the fact, that the afternoon company their mother had for six months was a machine, and that nobody told them.
That is a disclosure failure, not a technology failure, and it is how a Trust Cliff forms. Trust does not erode gently in these situations. It holds, and holds, and then it goes in a single week when one story runs and every family in the country asks the same question at once. This sector has already been over one of those cliffs. The Royal Commission was the first. A second one would land on a workforce and a set of providers who have spent five years trying to rebuild something.
The thing that makes it worse is that it is entirely avoidable. Every family already accepts that a carer is a stranger who is paid to be there. They accept it because it is disclosed, because the person has a name, and because there is a chain of accountability behind them. None of that is difficult to replicate for a device. It only becomes difficult if you decide not to mention it.
Three Things I Recommend You Do
The first thing to do is sort every deployed technology by function, not by vendor. Cleaning, monitoring, companionship. Write the list down and put a name against each one. The reason this matters is that the governance question is completely different in each bucket, and a single procurement policy covering all three will be wrong for at least two of them. Monitoring supports care. Companionship substitutes for it. If your board paper does not distinguish between those two, your board is not actually across this. If you want a structured way through it, the HUMAND framework exists for exactly this decision, and running it on “provide companionship to a resident” against “monitor overnight safety” will show you where the governance line sits.
The second thing to do is write the disclosure sentence now, before you need it. One sentence, in plain language, that tells a family what is in the room, what it does, what it records and who reviews what it reports. Do it while you are calm and not while a journalist is on the phone. Then read it out loud to somebody’s actual daughter and watch her face. If she flinches, the sentence is wrong or the deployment is wrong, and you have found that out on a Tuesday instead of on the news.
The third thing to do is check what your care metrics are still measuring. If part of a resident’s engagement is now delivered by a device, then an engagement minute no longer means what it meant when the number was designed. That is not a small reporting adjustment. It is the bed subsidy arriving in a new costume: a countable unit standing in for a quality you cannot count. Go back to whoever owns those definitions and make them restate what each number represents now. Do it before the funding model does it for you, because once a subsidy is attached to a metric, the metric stops being a description and starts being an instruction.
What is actually still open
None of this is an argument against robots in aged care. I have watched this question for close to twenty years, and I asked a version of it from a stage on the Gold Coast in 2013, back when it was still comfortably hypothetical. Here is what I was saying then. The honest position now is the one I gave Phil at the end of the segment. Not no robots and not no humans. Both, arranged properly, so that the few people we have are freed up to do the work only a person can do.
I will tell you what has stayed with me since though, and it is not a statistic.
Somewhere in the 1980s I had first-hand knowledge of a facility that had just been built. Brand new, upmarket, everything you would want. A new manager arrived and worked out he could make more money from it. He cut the nursing roster to one nurse overnight for 130 residents, and she was not registered at the time. On one night, ten chickens were divided across the entire building for the evening meal. It ended up in court. I will not tell you the rest of it.
That was forty years ago and the sector today is not that sector. But the mechanism that produced it has never actually been dismantled. It was a system that funded what it could count, staffed to the minimum that the count allowed, and trusted that nobody would check. Every element of that is available again the moment we decide a machine in the room is evidence that care is being delivered.
The technology is arriving either way. That part is not in question and it is not the interesting bit. What is genuinely still open is whether the terms get set by people who thought about it carefully, or by a procurement cycle and a strategy document that nobody in the sector read closely enough.
We already know what happens when you fund the object instead of the outcome. We have the receipts. The only real question is whether forty years was long enough to remember.
If it were your own mother in that room, you would want to know whether the person keeping her company that afternoon was a person. Everybody would. So write that into the policy while it is still a choice, and not a scandal.
If your organisation is making decisions about where machines sit alongside people in care, service or frontline work, this is exactly the work I do with leadership teams and boards: what the signals mean, what the ripple effects are, and what to settle before the moment becomes a crisis. Get in touch.
You can also subscribe to my Immediate Futures briefing, a short weekly read on the signals worth paying attention to, written for leaders who want to stay ahead of what is already arriving.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Are robots already used in Australian aged care?
Yes. Cleaning and logistics robots are common in larger facilities, monitoring devices are widespread, and companion robots such as Abi, built by the Melbourne company Andromeda Robotics, are already in homes run by named Australian providers. This is no longer a pilot phase question.
What is the difference between monitoring and companionship in aged care robotics?
Monitoring supports care. A sensor or wearable can be in the room at three in the morning and escalate to a person. Companionship substitutes for care, because the machine is not assisting the relationship, it is occupying it. The governance question is completely different in each case and a single procurement policy will get at least one of them wrong.
Why does Morris Misel compare aged care robots to the old bed subsidy?
Through the 1970s and 1980s Australian aged care funding attached to beds rather than to staffing or food, so operators added beds. A robot is a countable object in the same way a bed was. If a funding instrument attaches to the device rather than the hour of care it was meant to free up, the same distortion returns in a new form.
What is physical AI?
Physical AI is a relatively recent term for robots with a meaningful amount of AI built into them, so the machine acts in a room rather than only on a screen. It is the category most humanoid robot development now sits in, though almost all of that development is aimed at warehouses and factories rather than care settings.
What should a board do before deploying companion robots?
Three things. Sort every deployed technology by function into cleaning, monitoring and companionship, because each carries a different governance line. Write the disclosure sentence for families before you need it. And check whether your care metrics still measure anything real once part of a resident’s engagement is delivered by a device.
Do companion robots need to look human?
It depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve. Something human-shaped works where the goal is conversation and participation. For a person with advanced dementia the same device can frighten them, and a simpler responsive object is more comforting precisely because it does not pretend. Nothing here is right for everybody.
About Morris Misel
Morris Misel is a foresight strategist and keynote speaker based in Melbourne, Australia. He works with leaders, executives, boards, and associations worldwide, reading the signals, mapping the ripple effects, and setting better strategic choices in conditions of genuine uncertainty. His work spans Asia-Pacific, North America, and Europe, across financial services, healthcare, aged care, government, professional services, and technology. His proprietary frameworks, including HUMAND, Ripple Effects, and Immediate Futures, move organisations from pattern-naming to consequence-thinking. He is a regular commentator on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew in Hong Kong.
Enquire about a keynote or workshop → · Subscribe to Immediate Futures →
Full Segment Transcript — RTHK Radio 3, The Brew, 11 August 2026 ▼ Click to expand
Morris Misel speaking with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew
The magic is the evil robots win. Yeah, I know she can be them. Oh, Yoshimi. Yoshimi. Battles the pink robot. That’s the most appropriate song I could think of.
To say hi to Morris, who’s live from St. Kilda in Melbourne. How are you, Morris? Yeah, good. Happy Tuesday, everyone. Happy Tuesday, mate.
Give us the weather forecast. It’s 14. I overcast and can’t decide if it wants to rain more or less, but it wants to rain. Brilliant. Well, it’s boiling here. So either way, it’s lovely to catch you somewhere in the middle and have a chat.
Morris has just written a fantastic, fascinating, rather, not what it is about. New article about the one thing that we’ve always talked about since the conversation is about technology started. And that is, of course, robots, isn’t it, Morris? It is. We have to start where we always start. Betty, the robot from Jetsons.
For those people of my vintage is what we start to see and think about. But robots go back about 120 years or so, I think, in science fiction literature. History. Jules Verne? Perhaps, perhaps, or before. I knew you were going to ask me.
As soon as I said it, I cannot remember. It was before Jules Verne. Did Da Vinci draw, or any? He must have done. Well, he not robots as they would have been called then, but he certainly drew many mechanized what we would now call machines. Right.
So he definitely… was ahead of his time. He drew the helicopter, he drew submarines. So you know we could say they were forms of robots but they weren’t the android type things that we think of mostly. What were they called? They were in the Victorian era.
Those things. Oh I do know. I can’t remember the word. I mean I don’t but I know exactly what you’re saying. Automatons. Yeah well there you go.
There are your robots I guess. Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah they were really cool. I mean they were expensive. They were what we might call wind-up robots. I mean wind-up machines now but very very expensive and bespoke.
They were made by jewelers. I mean truly made by jewelers in those days. The technology was amazing but the thing is so basically again whenever people have any kind of help going way way back it always had to be humanoid and actually that’s kind of come to pass. I was talking about that new funny tv show called Android when she is just that but in Aussie it’s kind of happening isn’t it? It is. No no no that’s true.
I’m going to find it. I saw it on your night. The fact is I’m aware it hasn’t come here but I’ll go look I’ll go searching for it now. It’s very it’s very funny and the stick on the you go and watch it but the stick on this one is she uh Linda the android she’s a duff out of date model so that adds to the humor even more. Oh even better. I gotta find it.
Gotta find it. It’s the homework for the week. Well last last time we chatted I do remember those a couple of comments about getting back to health talk because I know that you’re very much into that and I guess that’s where we are right now so what have you written about? We are so this article I actually posted this morning was about robots in health. It was based on some reports that came out over the past week and something that I’ve been looking at for nearly 20 years or so, if not more. And that’s, I mean, the whole notion of aged care in home support, getting old and all those things, if it’s something I’ve been monitoring for a long time.
But robots have come into this space as a conversation piece. I think the last 20 years or so. What would have been the simplest, you know, empiric version of a robot helping an older person who needs a particular kind of help? The one that kind of put it on the radar screen for me was, I think about 15 years ago, it is still around. I mean, there’s newer versions of it, obviously. But the first time I saw what would be what we would consider a child’s toy.
So a plush toy and it was in the shape of a seal, an animal, you know, one that swims in the ocean, a seal. And it sat on people’s laps, people with dementia and the person would pad it like they might a dog or a cat. But what it did was it would understand how, you know, how that person padded it over time. So whether the pat was stronger or weaker, whether it had fallen off the, you know, not the person, but whether the object had fallen off the chair or off the lap. So it could do some really basic things like send messages back to a nursing staff. And that gave 24-7 attention, not care, attention to a person.
And it also gave the person some companionship. And yes, we should argue. And we should argue whether it could or bad. That was never part of a decision. But that was what that toy did. And I call the toy in those days.
And that’s what kind of pushed me into the space of thinking about where robots might be purposeful in aged care And since then especially the last year or two, but since then it’s become more and more of an industry It’s worth a couple of billion the elder care robot market is last year 2025 was worth 3.4 billion dollars globally this thing is called a paro paro just looking up It is and that that’s one of the what’s one of the new objects that came out in the last year or so Yeah, it’s a Melbourne base similar thing for a similar purpose But what it does is goes into a a home goes into dementia It’s for people who require if not 24-7 care very close to it But even with the best of intent it’s almost impossible to put a human being in front of a human being 24-7 Yeah, this is interesting because um, I know that Dementia or various kinds of it Alzheimer’s etc. They manifest in different ways and some people they wouldn’t want to sit down and Pet a thing they lose their temper. They get very fractious and they wouldn’t these are not for them Nothing is there for everybody. That’s absolutely right Yeah, so there are a lot there are lots of different kinds of robots But this is one that’s been around for a little while in the media talked about for a while Yeah, there’s abi a bi which is a companion robot And that was one that was built in Melbourne and came out the University of Melbourne that was built by You know, I say young it’s I should say that but a young woman who is 22 years of age when she founded the company and Good honor. She’s raised 23 million US over the last year or so to expand out what’s called Andromeda Robotics, the name of her company. Yeah.
Well, the interesting thing is here, bearing in mind what we just said about all kinds of different manifestations, presentations, do animals have a, you know, animatronic robots have a higher success rate? Again, it depends for purpose. So what I’ve done in this article, I’ve split robots, which are mechanized machines into three buckets, basically. The first one is cleaning. So it makes a lot of sense. In Australia, let’s put this into perspective, in Australia, we just do not have enough people to care for enough people.
And we’re not going to. I think that’s true all over the world. We have currently 1.35 million Australians who need some form of aged care. It may not be acute aged care. It may be in home assistance. Yeah.
1.35 out of a population of 27 million. And that’s only going to increase. I was about to say, I wonder if it’s going down. I often see articles about dementia treatments and the other that work. This is not just dementia. This is people who are frail.
This is people who are at home. People who want a little bit more care. People who can’t cook for themselves, can’t clean themselves. It’s the whole spectrum of just not being able to care for yourself in the way that you once might have. It’s either physical, mental, or some other reason. Hey, if you’re just listening to Morris now and you want to find out more, just go to morrisfuturist.com.
Go to the blog bit and you’ll see the article that we’re talking about. Brand new. Yeah, carry on. So in the guys of Australia, same around the world, Japan’s even more acute with… this problem. But in the guise of 1.35 million people needing assistance and that’s only increasing over the next decade or two.
And that’s because we’re an ageing population, like most populations around the world. I looked at robots as one way, one way only, to supplement. And that’s important, supplement what needs to be done. I kind of broke it into three buckets. First was cleaning. If we’re talking about institutionalised people, people in aged care facilities, a lot of work has to be done around keeping the place clean, hygienic, and looking spick and span has to be no question.
Maybe we can use robots in there. That’s quite common now. Large facilities of all kinds are using robots. And that tends to be where a lot of the robotics in aged care starts its life. The next bucket is what we spoke briefly about. And that’s, I call that monitoring, which are devices.
It may be the cute seal. It may just be something as simple as an armband. It may be what we, many of us watch, wearers or watch. It could be anything. There are lots of them. But what it does is 24-7 monitoring.
So obviously we’re talking about Australia today, Morris. Is it big, big industry there now? In Australia it’s growing. In Australia it’s quite small. In the rest of the world it is enormous. When we go to Europe, when we go to part of Asia, we go to Japan.
The industries are very, very large. In Australia it’s a growing concern. And that’s because in Australia up until maybe 10 or 15 years ago, we kind of sort of, not exactly, but kind of sort of had enough people for enough people. So there are enough carers in aged care to not… really have a great problem, just a known problem, a great problem, but today it’s a great problem. We just have too many people that require assistance and we want to give them assistance and we just can’t do it on a human-to-human capacity.
So we kind of got to figure out what should remain human. That’s what this article came down to. What should remain human and what can we do to supplement what needs to be done so that we can free up the few people we have that are working in aged care to do what they need to do. In your experience, both work-wise and obviously doing research, which bit of robotic care is being the biggest problem, the biggest challenge? The third bit, the companionship one. So that’s the third bucket.
And companionship because I think it’s very personalised as to what it means. I do not want, and I don’t want anyone I know, to be stuck with this seal robot or something like it even if it’s an android and said, here’s your companion. I don’t know the rest of the life talking to this thing. I don’t think that’s a good use. But in moderation and for the right purpose and the right people, it’s a useful tool. So companionship to me is the most difficult one because it’s a human-to-human connection.
The cleaning one, most other industries are coping with it and aged care specifically is just borrowing what’s been done elsewhere. So we’re essentially talking about the robots, if you like, that would have direct interaction with the person. So I think that’s not so much the ones that are cleaning up around them. I think so. And Japan is a great place. But Japan is a great place for elder care because Japan has had for many decades already the need to care for people who were elderly and the lack of people to do it with.
So most of the robotics, most of the things that I tend to look for come out of Japan to range enough because they’ve already had the use case for it. They’ve had decades literally of having to invent these things and having done it. So that’s where that pushes back to. But companionship is the one always that causes the most consternation, the most problems in the world. And we have to resolve that as a culture too. In Australia we also have a Royal Commission.
We have Royal Commission into everything, into who opened the Vegemite jar lately. A Royal Commission is where the government decides things are so terrible that some independent body have to go out and investigate and come back with a whole lot of findings. There was a Royal Commission which came out in March 2021. I know it seems like a long time ago but it still reverberates in the aged care industry like it came out 10 minutes ago. What it found was that one in three people in residential and home care have experienced substandard care one in three. And that include malnutrition, poor medication management, physical or sexual abuse, inappropriate restraints and it just went on.
And in a recent article, in a recent research piece we found again in Australia that 68% of residents were malnourished. nourished or risk of it. I mean that’s just that’s just why is this does it mean does it mean that I mean is it casting are they hiring the wrong kind of person to be a carer? It’s too easy to say that. I know I’m saying question mark. No I know you’re not but it’s too easy because that’s exactly what people are saying it’s become a whole cultural thing you know the aged care industry and it’s and it’s not a good thing to admit was seen exactly that the fact that I used industry at the end it really irritates me but that’s what it’s called and that’s exactly its problem it has been seen as an industry in the 1970s and the 1980s in Australia the government subsidized beds literally subsidized beds so if you had an aged care facility and you had 34 beds and you could cram out the six beds in the government would allow you to do that because it said it was caring for people but it didn’t ask whether there were more nurses it didn’t ask whether you provided more food it didn’t ask for anything that was empirical except show me a bed and a blanket and a pillow not really not really but that’s basically what it said and the industry became one and it’s of course that was a long time ago it’s not like that now but it has a long history of being seen as an industry that is there to make money and it tries and trims in my opinion I’ve said this on stage because they’re my clients as well yeah I’ve spoken to this industry for 20 years now I’ve said and I’ve looked them in the eyes and this is not true of all of them in fact the ones that I do was not because they’re mine I know are different from this but there are a great lot of shanks out there there are a great number of people who are just not doing what they should do who take people, and this is not just true of elderly people, but people that aren’t able to speak for themselves.
They just aren’t able to stand up for themselves, and they don’t value them in the way they should. You know what they’re forgetting most? They could be them one day. No, they’re forgetting it. It will be them one day. It will be them one day.
And that’s not easy to say to a whole industry. It’s also not true of the whole industry, because I do know firsthand that there are great, great examples. And yes, it comes down to a whole lot of things. Firstly, the cultural thing of calling institution. The government’s lagging behind. They don’t care what they’re saying.
I’ve had that argument with them. They’re lagging behind, and their solution is usually money. And money doesn’t resolve the issue. It’s only short-term. It’s a terrible industry as a career. That’s not true, but it’s seen as that.
It’s kind of like teaching in Australia. Teaching is the most honorable, wonderful human thing you can do, but it’s not valued. It’s not paid well. It’s not seen as something people do for a career. And in age here, in Australia, culturally, it’s seen as something that people fell into. If you say I’m an aged care worker, people just assume you couldn’t get another job.
You didn’t want to do anything else. It’s pretty crazy, isn’t it? It’s just not seen as something that’s valued. And the payment you get for it also shows that. So you’ve got all of these things which don’t lead to a robust industry. And unfortunately, we’re dealing with humans at a portion of their lives where they need us the most and can’t…
speak for themselves the most. There’s so many questions that just ping up when you get into this topic. Aren’t there? Yeah, really? I mean, I’m thinking about let’s let’s stay in this big, big, big factory and go down the corridor to the the other lab. And I’m wondering how much development and technological advancements are making aging less of a thing.
And that that’s the whole other side of it. So what you’re talking about is called gerontology. Gerontology. Gerontology is the science of aging. And that was a that was a topic. And now it’s an industry, literally in the last 10 years.
It’s an industry because many people have a lot of money. And we’ve spoken about a lot of them over the years. And they are those people are now funding gerontology. Google, for instance, one of its sub companies is a company 100% specifically around this notion. And they’re constantly scouring information, constantly putting hundreds of million dollars into keeping people alive and healthy for as long as possible. I call it longer.
I call you I call the selfish gene. I don’t think that’s bad. Because a lot of those people don’t want to age, they don’t want to disappear. They don’t want to become frail. They have the money, the time, the effort and resources to pay other people to figure out why we’re aging and how to stop it. Sit tight for a second.
Morris got the news coming up here. Because there’s a bit more to ask you about in this one. If you are listening to Morris now, go to morrisfuturist.com, hit the blog, and you’ll see the articles we’re talking about.
[News, weather and station break]
Righty Ho, still with Morris for a few more minutes when I wrap up on this one. It’s a fascinating topic and I feel that you always enjoy when we get into this area, Morris, because it’s something you can really feel is developing. It is, and also for the reasons we’ve said it’s just such an important field. We’re all getting older. We’re all getting older. You know, we’re all headed for this, but I also want these things talked about.
Because one of the things that the Commission kind of round about said, and we also, we spoke about a month or so ago about the AI statement that the government of Australia made, they also talked about aged care and the use of these sorts of devices in aged care and how important they might be, is that I think we now need to have a really serious conversation about where assistance works well in aged care. It’s going to be the same discussion in education everywhere else, but let’s talk about aged care now. Where does, where do these devices work well? Where are they just another symptom of warehousing people? Can people afford them? I want to do it.
Can people afford them? How do they work in people’s homes? There are all sorts of things that we really do need to come to terms with. And importantly, the people who do go into care facilities, their families and themselves have to know exactly who or what is looking after them at any given time. And that to me is the next big thing that will go wrong in this industry. It’s interesting Morris, because as just to clarify, we are talking about his manner.
He knows about Australia. Yeah, just from listening to you, you get the impression that this industry is just broken. Is that too extreme? It’s getting better. I shouldn’t. I mean, yes it was.
It absolutely was. There’s a horrific story I know firsthand in the 1980s that I won’t expand on, but I actually do know it because I was there, strangely enough, at the time. It ended up in our news. It ended up. in the courts, it ended up in all kinds of places, where a very, very upmarket, aged care facility, very upmarket, just brand new, built, had everything that opened and didn’t, whatever, they decided down the track with a new manager. So the original person was wonderful, I still actually know who it was, but the new manager that came on board that took over decided that he could make more money out of it.
He cut the nursing staff down, he put one nurse on overnight for 130 people, one nurse, and she wasn’t even registered at that time, and fed them, I think, on 10 chickens, was what they divided for one night’s meal across the entire thing. It’s as true a story as I can tell you, and I won’t tell you the rest of it, but that’s how the industry used to be. Today it is a mug… Yeah, and I was actually, I know these people well, unfortunately. Anyway, another story for another day, but anyway, so getting back to today, it’s not nearly as bad as that, but it still is seen by many to be an industry where money can be made, and that disappoints me, it’s getting better, there are really, really good providers, but I’m not so much concerned about the high end, if I can call it that. No.
People that can go into aged care and find a good facility with really good brands in there are incredible providers out there, they will take care of themselves. I’m more concerned about the every person who one day is going to have to make a decision about being home or not being home, having assistance, not having assistance, his family’s going to have to care for people in their family who are getting older, who are less capable of looking after themselves. Robots can play a part in this, it’s a big part, but we have to decide what robots to what capacity, who funds them, are they funded, should they be funded under medical care for instance, I would argue sometimes the answer is yes. The same way as giving people a pill or a prescription or something. What would be the argument for no in that case? That’s expensive.
It really is expensive and what do you do in place and who monitors these machines, can we trust the machines, AI has a part in it, there’s great technology, one of the big issues, I mean a lot of them, of people staying home on their own is that they will not take their medication, not because they don’t want to, because they’re forgotten. They simply don’t know the time. Everybody forgets to take a pill don’t they? They don’t know if they’ve taken it today twice or three times. Those things are really human activities and it’s one of the reasons people actually go into care because they just can’t be trusted, not because they’re malicious, they just can’t be trusted to know where they’ve taken tablets. Let’s talk about the actual things themselves because further down Morris’ article he gets into the part that isn’t speculation anymore.
So you said here the providers say so themselves publicly, the CEO of this company, Abi provides social connection, conversation and fun. It’s been extraordinary watching the speed at which residents and care teams have taken to Abi. She is now becoming an important part of our circle blah blah blah. She goes on, tell me about this real case study if you would. happy that we spoke about this is this young woman 22 who built up a company of last few years worth 23 million what it is it’s not it’s not quite that sealed I spoke about the beginning of our chat but it’s very similar it’s a device that sits with it sits with the person so it’s not it’s not humanoid it’s not you know no they become quite enamored with it which is not unusual I mean you and I kids do that you know we give kids a doll we give it a teddy bear we do all those kind of things and the child remembers and sees it as something it plays with so it’s not unusual for that to happen it’s not as if you know these things are macabre or anything else so in that state of mind the person sits with his Abi it’s it actually looks a bit humanoid it’s got a bit of color and a bit of you know song and dance on it I think it’s gone you know personally I think it’s gone a step too far but I’m thinking does it need to look a bit more human this has taken me back to Android that TV show does it need to look a bit human so that something in our heads gels with it this is the big debate this is a really big debate in robotics yeah there’s two camps one is the anthropomorphic camp which says it has to look like humans anthropomorphic and the other one is says a hundred thousand percent absolutely no way because we shouldn’t confuse one with the other and it really doesn’t matter it really doesn’t matter which side of the camp you’re honest to which is right or wrong I’m just wondering what would make an elderly person’s brain function in a far more natural way I mean would it be an animal or would it to me would be yeah it depends on what you’re trying to do I think that it would be anthropomorphic if you’re trying to give it some kind of stimulation, the human some kind of stimulation, where they would talk or be involved or you know participate in. As this one does according to your article yeah.
Exactly. So this one even though you would know it’s not a human, if you do a search on ABI which is how it’s spelled, ABI robot you’ll see a picture of it. You kind of know it’s a robot that’s a bit silly but it’s a bit of fun too and I think that’s what this is trying to do. If the person is less informed, if the person is more dementia, then this type of device really won’t matter very much and perhaps a seal or something that can pad or sit on its lap is far more comforting and comfortable on it because this honestly would spook you. If you don’t quite understand it, it could spook and that could make it worse. So in Australia right now Morris, which age group really are paying the price for all of the bad stuff that’s happened before?
What kind of age group are we talking about? I don’t think it’s so much the age group. I think it’s more the demographic group. I think it’s those middle-band of people that are going into aged care and aged care is really expensive. I mean in Australia, if you’re going into the top end, so these are the residential homes where they’re all where their apartments, that end where they have really good services, you can spend upwards. You could buy in at over a million dollars for an apartment in one of those and you’re not buying real estate, you’re just buying a room or the apartment.
You don’t own it and most of the franchise, most of the… arrangements, you actually have to then sell it back to the group that owns the building after you’ve stopped using it. And there’s a whole issue around that too. It’s not a straightforward real estate purchase, but it’s very expensive and then you pay ongoing fees for that. It’s all money, money, money, eh? Well, of course it is.
And at the bottom end, the middle end, you then have to find a care facility that you can afford to buy into and your pension will often not cover all of that. They will take that and then often ask for more money. And again, it’s like most things in life. It’s really a matter often of how much you can afford and how much the family is willing to sacrifice. And very often people can’t. And that’s it.
And that’s again is why you have these issues. So why the robotics thing comes into my world of discussion with this is that costs are only increasing. We can’t find enough people to help as we might want to. And we have to give care, we have to give people a quality of life all the way through. People deserve it. You and I deserve it.
One of the ways to do that is to supplement some of the things that might have otherwise been done by humans by using robots. And we have to decide today which of my three buckets or whatever analogy you want to use, those robots should be in and start funding and culturally making it normal and acceptable and getting people down that road so that we can write this aged care facility that we all will need at some stage. So let’s sort of get to our wrap up point here. So how much of what you’ve been talking about today? Is it part of the big development of what’s called physical AI? This area, how much is this going to take physical AI forward?
So physical AI is a relatively new term. It’s only been around for a couple of years. It’s basically robots, as we know them, with a bit of AI or a lot of AI chucked inside of it. That’s what it talks about now. So what they’re saying is that this anthropomorphic, you know, this human-looking robot could actually be, and you can’t see it, my fingers are doing air quotes, intelligent, and how much of it can talk and know you. There is, and this is totally possible, you could program one of these physical AIs, these robots, to actually know the person it’s with quite well.
And there’s been some really cool movies down, you know, historically, some cool movies where they’ve done that, and most of us have seen that kind of sci-fi where the person actually knows enough about the person to have intelligent conversation, can do basic chores for them. Those things may be possible down the track, not that far down the track, our friend Elon Musk. Sounds like it. So we almost made it to the end without saying his name. Our friend Elon Musk, literally now, last year or so, has said that he will have a fleet of robots that are going into the marketplace over the next two or three years. He claims somewhere around the 30,000 US mark, 30,000 to 40,000 US mark, that will be humanoid, and it’s possible.
This is not what he’s doing with them. They are not programmed for this yet. They’re programmed for warehouse use, but he’s… that this thing, you know, given a few years, could eventually maybe become one of these caribots and of course he’s not the only one in that space. I wonder what he thinks is the benefit of the humanoid bit. You just, because we’ve talked today about some wonderful devices, they look like boxes or this that and that.
Do you think, well why don’t these guys just cut to the chase? The human brain perceives another human looking thing. So why don’t they cut to the chase and just make it look like one? Well they can. To me it’s also a matter of trust. How much are we willing to trust?
Are we willing to put grandma and grandpa in the care of her robot? Fairly. At what point is that not right? At what point does it do what you and I have talked about with AI all the way through where it bluffs its way but really doesn’t know what it’s talking about but it makes us believe we are. Yeah, Granny took a tablet for three days and you go and find no one’s touched them. Again, I’m not saying these things happen but we need to start asking these questions of how much we trust these things which is why I think cleaning is easy because you can see if the floor is dirty or not.
Yeah, start modestly. Start modestly and where it really gets to acute care, the monitoring I think works well because most of us have wearable devices, watches and things, you know, those sorts of things where it monitors but not makes recommendation, makes sense. There are lots of things we can do now with robots and technology that free up people’s time so that when they’re working with the elderly they can use that more purposefully. That’s really where the debate should start now. Not no robots and not no humans, not either of them but really working together really well to do what we all want to. happen when we get to the age and let’s have a really good quality of life.
Thought provoking stuff as always. Robots are already working in Australian aged care. The argument we skipped is the one that matters. morrisfuturist.com and hit the blog part. Love it. Great stuff.
Morris, I’ll catch you next week. Bye bye for now. Ciao.
This post is based on my segment with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew, 11 August 2026.
