My research focuses on the ethics of AI in the UK and Japan, and on the development and use of robots for the care of older adults. Broader interests include other digital welfare technologies, emotion recognition systems, and public innovation policy and practice.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021
Voice controlled virtual assistants, delivered via consumer devices such as smart speakers and ta... more Voice controlled virtual assistants, delivered via consumer devices such as smart speakers and tablets, are being trialled by local authorities across England as a convenient and low-cost supplement or potential alternative to “traditional” telecare. Few papers have explored this increasingly widespread phenomenon, despite its growing importance. This article looks at choices by some local authorities to trial Alexa, within the context of the ongoing care crisis in England, with councils facing depleted funds, a lack of expert guidance on care technologies, and an increasingly complex and fragmented care technology marketplace. It draws on interviews with managers from eight English local authorities involved in the commissioning and trialling of technologies for adult social care to examine how and why virtual assistants are being implemented, and what implications their use might hold for care. Scaling up the application of such technologies could shift the role of local authoriti...
Political trust has long been presented as a key social determinant of pandemic resilience in pub... more Political trust has long been presented as a key social determinant of pandemic resilience in public health by facilitating public cooperation with government instructions. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, countries where citizens had relatively low levels of trust in government tended to see higher numbers of infections and deaths. Yet Japan’s public health response to COVID-19 complicates a straightforward relationship between political trust and success in dealing with the disease, and presents something of a paradox. Trust in government, very low by international comparison, was compounded by a lack of state legal authority to enforce its public health recommendations. Nevertheless, it appears that most people followed government advice, and in particular politicians’ calls for jishuku (“self-restraint”). This paper explores the Japanese government’s response to COVID-19 and places the concept of jishuku in historical context, arguing that it represents a complex dynamic that includes expectations about the solidaristic behavior of imagined fellow citizens, stigmatization and social coercion, and government appeals to ethnonationalist identity that together may have helped overcome low trust in government. “Compliance” itself is complicated in this picture, with compliance with individual measures dependent on the dynamic tension between a variety of different factors beyond political trust alone.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021
Voice controlled virtual assistants, delivered via consumer devices such as smart speakers and ta... more Voice controlled virtual assistants, delivered via consumer devices such as smart speakers and tablets, are being trialled by local authorities across England as a convenient and low-cost supplement or potential alternative to “traditional” telecare. Few papers have explored this increasingly widespread phenomenon, despite its growing importance. This article looks at choices by some local authorities to trial Alexa, within the context of the ongoing care crisis in England, with councils facing depleted funds, a lack of expert guidance on care technologies, and an increasingly complex and fragmented care technology marketplace. It draws on interviews with managers from eight English local authorities involved in the commissioning and trialling of technologies for adult social care to examine how and why virtual assistants are being implemented, and what implications their use might hold for care. Scaling up the application of such technologies could shift the role of local authorities towards one of an app developer and data broker, while generating considerable risks of reliance on the precarious technological infrastructure of global corporations that may have little interest in or sensitivity towards local care concerns. The findings suggest an urgent need for a national social care technology strategy and increased support for local authorities.
The last two decades have seen an explosion in the development and availability of new informatio... more The last two decades have seen an explosion in the development and availability of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) across UK social care. Supporters argue that ICT can help solve the urgent problems facing the sector: reducing the cost of care by enabling people to live in their own homes for longer; providing remote services and tools for self-care and management of chronic health conditions, and thus reducing the need for domiciliary care visits; enabling closer integration of health and social care; and providing more personalised and preventive care services through the use of data, algorithms and AI to keep users healthier for longer.
As the Audit Commission stated in their 2004 report 'Assistive Technology: Independence and Wellbeing', these new technologies offer "the tantalising possibility for public policy to meet more people's desire to remain independent for longer, while at the same time saving money overall". Sixteen years later, following a decade of austerity, with sustained reductions in social care funding, worsening workforce shortages, and a lack of political leadership on social care from central government, the promise of technologies that might deliver cost savings while improving services remains highly alluring. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis, which has disproportionately affected social care, has further highlighted the potential benefits of technologies to maintain or even improve services while reducing direct person-to-person contact.
Japan faces a large and rapidly growing care labor shortage. A common assumption is that the gove... more Japan faces a large and rapidly growing care labor shortage. A common assumption is that the government has a choice between alternatives that will shape the future of its institutional elderly care provision: increase the number of migrant caregivers, or use robots and other emergent technologies to substitute for human carers. This article, based on data from seven months’ ethnographic fieldwork at an elderly care home in Japan that was introducing three different types of care robot, challenges this binary framing. The introduction of these robots served to reconfigure care – increasing the amount of work tasks for human caregivers, deskilling aspects of care labor, and raising overall costs. The robots displaced rather than replaced human labor, recalibrating the distance between carers and recipients of care. While such devices may have been intended by politicians and engineers to solve Japan’s care crisis by replacing human carers, the reality of robot use makes this unlikely in the foreseeable future. Yet by reconfiguring care and helping overcome linguistic and cultural barriers – rendering it “culturally odorless” – robots may facilitate the introduction of migrant caregivers at the cost of the further precaritization, commodification, and devaluation of care work.
Faced with ageing populations, escalating care needs, and growing shortages of care workers, Japa... more Faced with ageing populations, escalating care needs, and growing shortages of care workers, Japanese and European Union governments have pursued large, publicly funded research projects to develop and commercialize care robots. Yet despite being the two world leaders in this field, having both spent hundreds of millions of euros (tens of billions of yen) on its development, Japan and the EU have rarely been compared directly and substantively in social studies of care robotics. How similar are their approaches to care robot development and commercialization, and what do the differences tell us about contrasting priorities in science, technology and innovation policy as well as tensions between treating care robotics as an industry and as a research domain? The first two sections of this paper chart Japanese and EU approaches to the development and implementation of care robots since the late 1990s. The final sections identify and analyse their key similarities and differences.
This article explores the attempted introduction of a lifting robot called “Hug” into an elderly ... more This article explores the attempted introduction of a lifting robot called “Hug” into an elderly care home in Japan. As demand for institutional elderly care in Japan escalates due to population aging and a move away from familial care, the shortage of professional care staff is also intensifying. Attributing this shortage partly to carers’ endemic back pain, the Japanese government and corporations have poured resources into developing high tech robotic lifting devices. Yet contrary to their expectation, many Japanese caregivers seem reluctant or even hostile to the idea of using such devices. I use fieldwork data to explore why this is the case, and find that lifting is situated within a practice of tactile, joking care aimed at ensuring anshin (安心; “peace of mind”) for both care staff and residents. Mechanical replacement of this tactile connection was strongly resisted as “disrespectful” by care staff.
Vibraimage is a digital system that quantifies a subject's mental and emotional state by analysin... more Vibraimage is a digital system that quantifies a subject's mental and emotional state by analysing video footage of the movements of their head. Vibraimage is used by police, nuclear power station operators, airport security and psychiatrists in Russia, China, Japan and South Korea, and has been deployed at an Olympic Games, FIFA World Cup, and G7 Summit. Yet there is no reliable evidence that the technology is actually effective; indeed, many claims made about its effects seem unprovable. What exactly does vibraimage measure, and how has it acquired the power to penetrate the highest profile and most sensitive security infrastructure across Russia and Asia? I first trace the development of the emotion recognition industry, before examining attempts by vibraimage's developers and affiliates scientifically to legitimate the technology, concluding that the disciplining power and corporate value of vibraimage is generated through its very opacity, in contrast to increasing demands across the social sciences for transparency. I propose the term 'suspect AI' to describe the growing number of systems like vibraimage that algorithmically classify suspects / non-suspects, yet are themselves deeply suspect. Popularising this term may help resist such technologies' reductivist approaches to 'reading'-and exerting authority over-emotion, intentionality and agency.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021
Voice controlled virtual assistants, delivered via consumer devices such as smart speakers and ta... more Voice controlled virtual assistants, delivered via consumer devices such as smart speakers and tablets, are being trialled by local authorities across England as a convenient and low-cost supplement or potential alternative to “traditional” telecare. Few papers have explored this increasingly widespread phenomenon, despite its growing importance. This article looks at choices by some local authorities to trial Alexa, within the context of the ongoing care crisis in England, with councils facing depleted funds, a lack of expert guidance on care technologies, and an increasingly complex and fragmented care technology marketplace. It draws on interviews with managers from eight English local authorities involved in the commissioning and trialling of technologies for adult social care to examine how and why virtual assistants are being implemented, and what implications their use might hold for care. Scaling up the application of such technologies could shift the role of local authoriti...
Political trust has long been presented as a key social determinant of pandemic resilience in pub... more Political trust has long been presented as a key social determinant of pandemic resilience in public health by facilitating public cooperation with government instructions. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, countries where citizens had relatively low levels of trust in government tended to see higher numbers of infections and deaths. Yet Japan’s public health response to COVID-19 complicates a straightforward relationship between political trust and success in dealing with the disease, and presents something of a paradox. Trust in government, very low by international comparison, was compounded by a lack of state legal authority to enforce its public health recommendations. Nevertheless, it appears that most people followed government advice, and in particular politicians’ calls for jishuku (“self-restraint”). This paper explores the Japanese government’s response to COVID-19 and places the concept of jishuku in historical context, arguing that it represents a complex dynamic that includes expectations about the solidaristic behavior of imagined fellow citizens, stigmatization and social coercion, and government appeals to ethnonationalist identity that together may have helped overcome low trust in government. “Compliance” itself is complicated in this picture, with compliance with individual measures dependent on the dynamic tension between a variety of different factors beyond political trust alone.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021
Voice controlled virtual assistants, delivered via consumer devices such as smart speakers and ta... more Voice controlled virtual assistants, delivered via consumer devices such as smart speakers and tablets, are being trialled by local authorities across England as a convenient and low-cost supplement or potential alternative to “traditional” telecare. Few papers have explored this increasingly widespread phenomenon, despite its growing importance. This article looks at choices by some local authorities to trial Alexa, within the context of the ongoing care crisis in England, with councils facing depleted funds, a lack of expert guidance on care technologies, and an increasingly complex and fragmented care technology marketplace. It draws on interviews with managers from eight English local authorities involved in the commissioning and trialling of technologies for adult social care to examine how and why virtual assistants are being implemented, and what implications their use might hold for care. Scaling up the application of such technologies could shift the role of local authorities towards one of an app developer and data broker, while generating considerable risks of reliance on the precarious technological infrastructure of global corporations that may have little interest in or sensitivity towards local care concerns. The findings suggest an urgent need for a national social care technology strategy and increased support for local authorities.
The last two decades have seen an explosion in the development and availability of new informatio... more The last two decades have seen an explosion in the development and availability of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) across UK social care. Supporters argue that ICT can help solve the urgent problems facing the sector: reducing the cost of care by enabling people to live in their own homes for longer; providing remote services and tools for self-care and management of chronic health conditions, and thus reducing the need for domiciliary care visits; enabling closer integration of health and social care; and providing more personalised and preventive care services through the use of data, algorithms and AI to keep users healthier for longer.
As the Audit Commission stated in their 2004 report 'Assistive Technology: Independence and Wellbeing', these new technologies offer "the tantalising possibility for public policy to meet more people's desire to remain independent for longer, while at the same time saving money overall". Sixteen years later, following a decade of austerity, with sustained reductions in social care funding, worsening workforce shortages, and a lack of political leadership on social care from central government, the promise of technologies that might deliver cost savings while improving services remains highly alluring. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis, which has disproportionately affected social care, has further highlighted the potential benefits of technologies to maintain or even improve services while reducing direct person-to-person contact.
Japan faces a large and rapidly growing care labor shortage. A common assumption is that the gove... more Japan faces a large and rapidly growing care labor shortage. A common assumption is that the government has a choice between alternatives that will shape the future of its institutional elderly care provision: increase the number of migrant caregivers, or use robots and other emergent technologies to substitute for human carers. This article, based on data from seven months’ ethnographic fieldwork at an elderly care home in Japan that was introducing three different types of care robot, challenges this binary framing. The introduction of these robots served to reconfigure care – increasing the amount of work tasks for human caregivers, deskilling aspects of care labor, and raising overall costs. The robots displaced rather than replaced human labor, recalibrating the distance between carers and recipients of care. While such devices may have been intended by politicians and engineers to solve Japan’s care crisis by replacing human carers, the reality of robot use makes this unlikely in the foreseeable future. Yet by reconfiguring care and helping overcome linguistic and cultural barriers – rendering it “culturally odorless” – robots may facilitate the introduction of migrant caregivers at the cost of the further precaritization, commodification, and devaluation of care work.
Faced with ageing populations, escalating care needs, and growing shortages of care workers, Japa... more Faced with ageing populations, escalating care needs, and growing shortages of care workers, Japanese and European Union governments have pursued large, publicly funded research projects to develop and commercialize care robots. Yet despite being the two world leaders in this field, having both spent hundreds of millions of euros (tens of billions of yen) on its development, Japan and the EU have rarely been compared directly and substantively in social studies of care robotics. How similar are their approaches to care robot development and commercialization, and what do the differences tell us about contrasting priorities in science, technology and innovation policy as well as tensions between treating care robotics as an industry and as a research domain? The first two sections of this paper chart Japanese and EU approaches to the development and implementation of care robots since the late 1990s. The final sections identify and analyse their key similarities and differences.
This article explores the attempted introduction of a lifting robot called “Hug” into an elderly ... more This article explores the attempted introduction of a lifting robot called “Hug” into an elderly care home in Japan. As demand for institutional elderly care in Japan escalates due to population aging and a move away from familial care, the shortage of professional care staff is also intensifying. Attributing this shortage partly to carers’ endemic back pain, the Japanese government and corporations have poured resources into developing high tech robotic lifting devices. Yet contrary to their expectation, many Japanese caregivers seem reluctant or even hostile to the idea of using such devices. I use fieldwork data to explore why this is the case, and find that lifting is situated within a practice of tactile, joking care aimed at ensuring anshin (安心; “peace of mind”) for both care staff and residents. Mechanical replacement of this tactile connection was strongly resisted as “disrespectful” by care staff.
Vibraimage is a digital system that quantifies a subject's mental and emotional state by analysin... more Vibraimage is a digital system that quantifies a subject's mental and emotional state by analysing video footage of the movements of their head. Vibraimage is used by police, nuclear power station operators, airport security and psychiatrists in Russia, China, Japan and South Korea, and has been deployed at an Olympic Games, FIFA World Cup, and G7 Summit. Yet there is no reliable evidence that the technology is actually effective; indeed, many claims made about its effects seem unprovable. What exactly does vibraimage measure, and how has it acquired the power to penetrate the highest profile and most sensitive security infrastructure across Russia and Asia? I first trace the development of the emotion recognition industry, before examining attempts by vibraimage's developers and affiliates scientifically to legitimate the technology, concluding that the disciplining power and corporate value of vibraimage is generated through its very opacity, in contrast to increasing demands across the social sciences for transparency. I propose the term 'suspect AI' to describe the growing number of systems like vibraimage that algorithmically classify suspects / non-suspects, yet are themselves deeply suspect. Popularising this term may help resist such technologies' reductivist approaches to 'reading'-and exerting authority over-emotion, intentionality and agency.
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Papers by James Wright
As the Audit Commission stated in their 2004 report 'Assistive Technology: Independence and Wellbeing', these new technologies offer "the tantalising possibility for public policy to meet more people's desire to remain independent for longer, while at the same time saving money overall". Sixteen years later, following a decade of austerity, with sustained reductions in social care funding, worsening workforce shortages, and a lack of political leadership on social care from central government, the promise of technologies that might deliver cost savings while improving services remains highly alluring. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis, which has disproportionately affected social care, has further highlighted the potential benefits of technologies to maintain or even improve services while reducing direct person-to-person contact.
Drafts by James Wright
As the Audit Commission stated in their 2004 report 'Assistive Technology: Independence and Wellbeing', these new technologies offer "the tantalising possibility for public policy to meet more people's desire to remain independent for longer, while at the same time saving money overall". Sixteen years later, following a decade of austerity, with sustained reductions in social care funding, worsening workforce shortages, and a lack of political leadership on social care from central government, the promise of technologies that might deliver cost savings while improving services remains highly alluring. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis, which has disproportionately affected social care, has further highlighted the potential benefits of technologies to maintain or even improve services while reducing direct person-to-person contact.