THE ROBOTS ARE CHEAP, PATIENT, SELF-LESS AND NON-GENDERED:

The labour of caring - largely still done by women - has always been belittled and undervalued. The vast bulk is unpaid; the Office for National Statistics valued unpaid childcare alone at £343bn and cleaning and laundry at £97.2bn in 2012 - all those years of sorting odd socks finally get a price tag. When care becomes part of a job, it is paid badly and is believed to require minimal training. [...]

But the characteristics needed to provide this kind of care are losing cultural traction. Attentiveness requires two crucial ingredients: patience and the willingness to put one's own preoccupations aside and to be available to another. Yet in a myriad of ways we are all being groomed - by consumerism and digital media - to be the opposite: impatient and self-preoccupied. That impatience makes us easily distractable, addicted to the next stimulus.

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