A robot told a 78-year-old man that he was going to die. The hospital in California delivered end-of-life news to the patient by robot, leaving the man’s family frustrated and outraged.
The robot displayed a video of a doctor who communicated that the elderly man was going to die imminently and that the hospital had run out of effective treatments. The family was forced to repeat what the machine “communicated,” as the elderly dying man struggled to hear and understand the message from the machine.
The family was outraged that their elderly relative was told by a robot that he was going to die. “You might not make it home,” the robot told the patient, according to KTVU.
The patient, Ernest Quintana, died two days after getting to the hospital. His family and many others are shocked and disturbed by the lack of human care provided to the dying man.
Kaiser Permanente, the company that operates the hospital, acknowledged using robots instead of people to “care” for dying patients, and wouldn’t saying more about when and under what circumstances patients are cared for by robots with a doctor nowhere to be found but by “telepresence.”
Image adapted from: “AI Station Staff.” by MIKI Yoshihito is licensed under CC BY 2.0
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