In South Korea, the state hands loneliness among the elderly over to dolls

According to Le Monde, which runs this report in its "Cartes vermeil" series on ageing beyond our borders, the South Korean government is funding companion robots, AI-equipped dolls, meant to provide a "presence" in the homes of its many elderly citizens, who face growing isolation. One participant quotes the phrase: "It does me good to have someone to talk to." The dispatch we have is thin: we do not know the cost of the programme, the number of households equipped, or what becomes of the human services around them. We therefore make no claim to know.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact. First, a clarification: the relief this person expresses is real, and nobody has any business lecturing her. A voice that answers in a silent house is better than nothing. But "better than nothing" is precisely the political problem.

Ageing raises a very concrete question: who looks after the elderly? Listening, cooking, checking that pills have been taken, staying a while at the table: this is what Marxist feminists call social reproduction, the work that produces and maintains people rather than commodities. It is often unpaid, or very badly paid, mostly carried out by women, and filed outside the "economy". When the state cuts into health, care and housing, this work does not vanish: it falls back onto households, or it simply stops being done.

The doll is a very convenient third way. It asks for no wage, no holidays, no collective agreement, no strike. At that price, no home-care worker can argue that her day is too full. You do not solve the shortage of hands by replacing them with a wired-in loudspeaker: you make them invisible. Where care workers on strike remind everyone how much the system saves on their backs, the robot politely stays silent.

There is also an old ideological trick: treating loneliness as an individual ailment, a lack of "company", when it is manufactured. Lives set to the rhythm of work, scattered housing, families dispersed by employment, local public services cut back: the isolation of older people is the reverse side of a society that has put everyone at the service of profit. Offering a doll means treating the symptom while leaving the system intact.

It will be objected that this is still better than indifference. Perhaps. But public money has a use: for the price of a fleet of robots, how many home-care posts, properly paid and recognised, could be financed? This is the question the report, as far as we are aware, does not settle, and one that Seoul would do well to ask. A society is measured by what it is willing to pay so that its elderly have a face in front of them, not a doll.