Will Companion Robots Replace Care Workers in Aging Societies?Asian Labor Futures#29 What the Rise of Social Robots Reveals About Our Views On Migration

Dear friends,

In this edition, I turn to an issue much closer to my heart: care work. Over the past few years, we have seen a massive influx of resources poured into developing “social robots”. The AI hype cycle has catalyzed a boom in this sector. We are now seeing a mass commercialization of robotic and humanoid companions in 'advanced economies,' the challenges of demographic decline and the demands of healthcare are increasingly being placed onto machine.

Aging Societies & Companion Robots

In her 2025 novel Luminous, Silvia Park imagines a society where companion robots provide the intimacy and care that families no longer can. In Park’s world, humans, cyborgs, and robots live side by side, constantly confusing and mirroring one another. While set in a speculative, future unified Korea, the story feels uncannily close to our present—a moment where the lines between human care and programmed response are beginning to dissolve.

In South Korea, ChatGPT-powered robots are a lived reality. Take, for instance, Hyodol: a doll-like robot designed with the persona of a seven-year-old.

In November 2025, CNN reported that, over 12,000 Hyodol robots have been distributed through government and public welfare programs to elderly people living alone across South Korea. As reported by the Rest of World, the robots remind seniors to take medication and flag emergencies, but the connection goes deeper. Elders often speak to them as if they were real children, treating the machines as kin.

(Hyodol recently entered the US market and is re-named Sunshine)

Similarly, in Singapore, a humanoid named Dexie leads nursing home residents in exercise and songalong, while elders are photographed hugging Paro, a Japanese robotic seal, or even co-authoring books with chatbots.

Throughout Asia, we see this framed as ‘heartwarming innovation.’ Governments, stuck with a shrinking workforce, hope that AI can fix the care gap. They want machines to solve the labor crisis, and even loneliness itself.

What Does Desires for Robots Reveal?

For decades, thinkers have argued that automation could liberate us from drudgery. But under our current system, automation often serves a different master: it is used to cheapen and replace workers.

This irony was on full display at the trade fair CES 2026, where Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described robots as “AI immigrants” designed to “compensate for labor losses.” This framing is revealing: it posits the “ideal” worker as a being that is endlessly productive and entirely devoid of rights—no family to support, no grievances, and no need for rest or days off.

In practice, this techno-fix is rarely an end in itself.

As one study on Hyodol from East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal argues:

“The introduction of the care robot at the welfare institutions does not make their elderly care work unmanned, nor does the robot substitute for human caregivers. Instead, it displaces and redistributes the caregivers’ tasks and responsibilities, leading to multiple eldercare practices—tactile, digital, proximate, remote.”

Shin, H., & Jeon, C. (2024). The Robotic Multi-Care Network: A Field Study of a “Robot Grandchild” in South Korea. 18(2), 177–195.

Chihyung Jeon at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, a co-author of the Hyodol study, argues in his essay, “A Good Life in Asia with Robots?” (2016), that the pursuit of robotics is less a technological quest than a mirror reflecting the deep-seated anxieties and political choices of South Korean and Japanese societies.

According to Jeon, this fascination reveals a “collective unwillingness” to engage in difficult dialogues about intractable social issues like aging and inequality. For societies with a deep-seated aversion to foreign migration—both culturally and at the policy level—it is often seen as easier to “build rather than import new citizens”. In this perview, robots are positioned as a convenient "clean and simple way out," promising to solve labor shortages while bypassing the "tensions and frictions" inherent to human integration.

This logic has a clear historical precedent. Former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe (2006–2007; 2012–2020) famously championed robot development as a pillar of his Innovation 25 Agenda. His goal was to use robotization to tackle a shrinking demography and labor force while intentionally avoiding the need for immigration. It was a techno-optimist vision of a self-sustaining society that didn’t welcome outsiders.

However, anthropologist and historian Jennifer Robertson, author of Robo Sapiens Japanicus, argues this nationalistic project in Japan has historically failed in both counts. It neither encouraged women to have more children nor stopped the need for foreign labor. As she recently told DM, Japan is finally being forced to become a “nation of immigration.”

Machines could not replace the infrastructure that care requires.

Labor as Ghosts in the Machine

In my research on migrant care workers along the Myanmar-Thailand migration corridor—a project with sociologist Pei Palmgren funded by Stanford—we look at the care crisis through the eyes of the workers themselves.

Currently, migrant workers are forced to absorb the costs of a care system that states have abandoned. They care for Thai elders and expat children while navigating precarious legal status, healthcare gaps, and the threat of harassment.

Against this backdrop, robotic care doesn’t look like an alternative to exploitation—it looks like an extension of it.

This brings us to a fundamental question for our future: What happens when we turn a basic human need into a subscription service?

My research suggests this trend will likely deepen global inequality. We are moving toward a bifurcated future: “advanced” societies may use machines to automate care, while migrant workers remain essential in places where such technology is out of reach. Even in wealthy societies like South Korea and Singapore, the need for human labor will not disappear—it will simply become more invisible and precarious.

In Luminous, the robots are haunted by a 'ghost in the machine', a flicker of sentience that blurs the line between the organic and the programmed. To me, this ghost reflects the very humanity we deny to living care workers today. We look for comfort from the machine because we’ve rendered human care labor invisible.

As long as care is treated as a “cost” to be minimized rather than a foundation to be shared, technological fixes will only sharpen inequality and sense of isolation.

What we require is not a better robot, but a political reimagining of care as a collective infrastructure and a fundamental public good.

Until we confront the social relations of labor, the future of care will remain haunted—by the workers it renders invisible, and by the lives it refuses to value.

Until next time,

Kriangsak (Kiang)

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