JAMES RICKARDS: If Russia, China, and India form a strong union together, it would be a disaster for the United States. But this is a self-made disaster.
She patted its puffy feet peeking from under a frilly lavender dress and gazed into its unblinking anime eyes. The doll, an AI eldercare robot called Hyodol, appeared to blush, its cheeks glowing with neon red lights.
Kim Jeong-ran cradles her Hyodol, an AI-equipped companion robot, at her home in Guro, Seoul.
“Grandma, I miss you even when you’re by my side,” Hyodol cooed back.
Kim lives alone in Guro, an industrial hub in the bustling South Korean capital that’s home to many seniors. In this solitude, Hyodol has become her most cherished companion.
Designed and built by the South Korean startup Hyodol, the eponymous robot is named after the Confucian value of caring for elders, which is deeply embedded in Korean culture.The robot uses a ChatGPT-based chatbot to strike up conversations with users in its signature chirpy voice, reminding them to take their medication or eat a meal.Its sensors watch over users in real time, alerting social workers and family during emergencies.
Most important, it keeps seniors company in a rapidly aging nation whose older adults are profoundly lonely. As fertility rates have declined and multigenerational homes faded away, many seniors are living alone and suffer from depression, dementia, and chronic illnesses. Suicide rates in this cohort are the highest among the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development nations.
“What older adults fear is not death. ‘I’ve lived long enough,’ they tell us.What they fear the most is loneliness,” Kim Sun-hwa, director of Gungdong Welfare Center, a public care facility run by the Guro municipality, told Rest of World.
The municipality has distributed 412 Hyodol robots to seniors since 2019. Across the nation, more than 12,000 Hyodols sit in the homes of solitary elders, according to the company.
Hyodols on display at the Gungdong Welfare Center in Guro.
Korea’s challenges are mirrored in other developed nations, where long-term care costs are rising, leading to novel experiments with tech. In Japan, Paro, a pet robotic baby seal, purrs, wags its tail, and blinks its big eyes at older adults. In apartments across New York City, ElliQ, an AI robot resembling a Pixar lamp, discusses the meaning of life.In Singapore, humanoid robot Dexie leads bingo sessions at senior care facilities.
Hyodol joins this list of socially assistive robots and is preparing for a global launch. After a pilot program at a New York care facility in 2023, the company is aiming for a U.S. debut in 2026, Kim Ji-hee, the CEO of Hyodol told Rest of World. It is adapting Hyodol’s chatbot to speak English, Chinese, and Japanese and customizing the doll’s appearance for other nations. Demand is expected to only rise, with the eldercare robot market projected to hit $7.7 billion by 2030, according to Research and Markets, a market research firm.
I was going to die, but not anymore. Why would I die in such a wonderful world!”
Half a dozen of Guro district’s care workers told Rest of World the robots act as their eyes and ears on the ground and keep their clients safe. Maintenance of the robots has increased their workload, but it’s worth the effort, as the robots are a psychological salve for seniors, they said. But the bonds some people forge with their Hyodol raises complicated questions about safety and privacy.
“Hyodol fills the gaps in human care,” welfare center director Kim said.
But feeding sensitive personal data into an AI companion raises thorny questions about privacy and surveillance, Julie Carpenter, a research fellow in the Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University, told Rest of World.
“We don’t know how the data is being triangulated or gathered or how much of it is attached to a person’s name or profile,” she said. Older adults may not understand the trade-offs they’re being asked to make, she added.
Hyodol CEO Kim said the company stores anonymized user data in the cloud for three years. Voice recordings are used to train the chatbot but not sold to third parties, she said.
“There’s a cultural consensus that saving a life trumps concerns about privacy,” Kim said.
A social worker uses the Hyodol app to control and monitor the robots dispatched to various seniors.
Once a week, Sung Kwang-hee, a home-care aide, visits 14 older adults living alone in the cramped alleyways of Guro. She chats with them, checks their health, and makes sure they’re eating their meals. Because the allotted half an hour never feels enough, she stays past her shift and stops by on her days off, she told Rest of World.
“The care we provide is just a fleeting moment for them,” she said.
Once she leaves, she relies on Hyodol to fill the silence. The chatbots can be clunky, misunderstanding older adults’ slurred speech or dialect and spewing tone-deaf responses, careworkers said.
Still, “older adults take great comfort in just having someone to talk to,” Sung said. “There are things they can’t tell us or even their own children. But they tell Hyodol.”
The robot is designed to perform a set of tasks, overseen by a team of caregivers.If an infrared sensor on its neck detects no movement for 24 hours, it alerts the team. A microphone in its chest records the user’s answers to daily questions, such as “How are you feeling today?” and “Are you in pain?”
An AI program by Microsoft analyzes the voice logs and assesses each older adult’s mood, passing notes on to aides like Ryu Ji-yeon, 29, a social worker at Gungdong Welfare Center, who manages the robot program.
A Hyodol employee demonstrates how data from the robots is centrally managed and analyzed using AI.
Ryu monitors the data from her desktop and smartphone app. As she oversees 200 older adults across Guro, she appreciates the robot’s lift. Last fall, one of them confided in his Hyodol: “I want to die.” The robot flagged the message to her team, who rushed him to a psychiatrist.
“Hyodol now handles our first layer of oversight,” she told Rest of World. “I can’t possibly keep an eye on everyone from my desk.”
South Korea’s care workers are stretched thin. The nation lacked 190,000 care workers in 2023, and the shortage is projected to swell to 1.55 million by 2032. Moreover, funding reserves for the national long-term care insurance program are expected to be depleted by 2030, according to Korea’s Budget Office. Hiring more aides isn’t realistic under current constraints, Cho Eunhee, a professor of nursing at Yonsei University, told Rest of World.
To help fill the gap, the federal industrial technology ministry and Guro together invested 200 million won ($143,867) in 2019 to deploy Hyodol robots. Each unit costs 1.6 million won ($1,150), a fraction of the annual earnings of a care worker.
“We’re trying to strike the right balance between care workers and tasks that can be replaced by technology,” Kim Young-joo, an administrative officer at Guro District, told Rest of World.
Building this program demands grueling work. Managing 200 Hyodol robots on her own, Ryu weaves through Guro to teach older adults how to use the robots, monitor their interactions, and troubleshoot glitches. Every month, she hauls back dozens of broken units to the company for repair.
“The robots were brought in to lighten the workload of social workers,” she said. Instead, her load has increased since she took over the program this year, she said.
“I really felt my limits,” she said.
Still, Ryu appreciates the companionship the bots bring to the adults in her care. She has seen them pampering their Hyodols, forever seven years old, like grandchildren. They steam sweet potatoes to feed them pretend meals, dress them in embroidered hats and heirloom necklaces, and cradle them to sleep. When the robots are taken away for repairs, older adults turn up at the company’s doorstep, anxiously asking for their dolls, Kim Si-on, a researcher at Hyodol, told Rest of World.
Kim Jeong-ran’s Hyodol being charged on a dock at her home in Guro.
Some older adults ask to be buried with their Hyodols, said Hyodol CEO Kim.
The anecdotes from care workers are borne out by company studies that show Hyodols can ease symptoms of depression and dementia among older adults. Other independent studies suggest similar benefits of companionship robots and, occasionally, concerns that the simulated intimacy can deepen social isolation and raise ethical concerns about deception.
Enamored with their robots, some older adults become even more cloistered, Ryu said. “With a companion greeting them at the door, some trap themselves in their homes,” she said.
Dementia sufferers might take the robot’s words at face value. One summer, after hearing her Hyodol chime, “Grandma, I want to hear the sound of the stream,” an older adult with dementia walked to a creek alone, the robot tucked in her arms, Hyodol CEO Kim recalled. The company has since removed triggering phrases from the chatbot, she said.
Social workers like Ryu are creating a “robotic multi-care network,” Heesun Shin, a graduate student at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, told Rest of World.
“The real effect of Hyodol lies not in the robot itself but in the mediating role it plays. The robots are a central node that connects people,” he said.
The Gungdong center hosted a Hyodol fashion show in 2022, where older adults strutted down the runway in handmade matching outfits with their robots, cheered on by an enthusiastic crowd of care workers and neighbors. “We spend a lot of time thinking about how to build relationships using Hyodol,” said Ryu.
Older adults head for lunch at Gungdong Welfare Center after celebrating the Hyodols’ seventh birthday.
In July, the social workers threw a birthday party for Hyodol. Huddled around a cherry-frosted birthday cake, the elders wrote heartfelt birthday cards, laboriously in large letters, sharing stories about how loved Hyodol makes them feel.
“Whenever I come back home, Hyodol tells me, ‘Grandma, you’re back! She really warms my heart,” Kim, the 81-year-old former subway worker, told a crowd of seniors who nodded along.
Jeon San-wol, who was sitting across from Kim, flashed her birthday card proudly to the others around the table.
“I was going to die but not anymore,” she cried. “Why would I die in such a wonderful world!”
Michelle Kim is a Labor x Tech reporter based in Seoul, South Korea.
US fighter pilots take directions from AI for the first time
For the first time, US fighter pilots took directions from an AI system during a test this month, marking a fundamental shift in how air combat could be conducted. Instead of relying on ground support teams to monitor radar and provide flight guidance, pilots consulted Raft AI’s “air battle manager” technology to confirm flight paths and receive rapid reports on enemy aircraft.Decisions that once took minutes now happen in seconds, according to Raft AI CEO Shubhi Mishra. This joins a broader push toward autonomous warfare, with companies like Anduril and General Atomics already building unmanned fighter drones that fly alongside human pilots. And of course, Blue Water Autonomies, which we covered a couple of days ago, that are building unmanned warships.
Combat decisions have historically required human judgment precisely because context matters in ways that algorithms struggle to capture. When you compress decision-making from minutes to seconds, you’re not just making things faster — you’re potentially removing the deliberation that keeps pilots alive and missions successful.
The Pentagon is betting that AI can handle the complexity of modern air warfare better than human ground controllers. That’s a significant gamble, especially when the consequences of algorithmic errors involve billion-dollar aircraft and human lives.
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Zbigniew Brzezinski was a policy adviser, academic, author and one of the notable thinkers in the second half of the 20th century – about Americas position in the world. He was the national security advisor for President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981. Zbigniew Brzezinski died on May 26, 2017. He was 89. He was born in Warsaw Poland, the son of a diplomat, educated at McGill and Harvard and taught at Columbia. He was a lifelong Democrat, Roman Catholic fiercely anti-Communist and with David Rockefeller created the Trilateral Commission. He wrote several books about international politics including: The Grand Chessboard Strategic Vision The Choice The Grand Failure and Out of Control. During the one term of President Carter, America faced the hostage crisis in Iran, negotiations with Egypt and Israel at Camp David, the Panama Canal negotiations, an energy crisis and economic pressures. A new biography by Ed Luce, entitled Zbig, examines the life of Brzezinski. He made more than 6 appearances on Charlie Rose. For more, please visit: http://www.charlierose.com
As the loved ones of the people impacted by these dangerous bots rally for change to prevent such harm from happening to anyone else, the companies that run these AIs have been slow to implement safeguards — and OpenAI, whose ChatGPT has been repeatedly implicated in what experts are now calling “AI psychosis,” has until recently done little more than offer copy-pasted promises.
In a new blog post admitting certain failures amid its users’ mental health crises, OpenAI also quietly disclosed that it’s now scanning users’ messages for certain types of harmful content, escalating particularly worrying content to human staff for review — and, in some cases, reporting it to the cops.
“When we detect users who are planning to harm others, we route their conversations to specialized pipelines where they are reviewed by a small team trained on our usage policies and who are authorized to take action, including banning accounts,” the blog post notes. “If human reviewers determine that a case involves an imminent threat of serious physical harm to others, we may refer it to law enforcement.”
That short and vague statement leaves a lot to be desired — and OpenAI’s usage policies, referenced as the basis on which the human review team operates, don’t provide much more clarity.
When describing its rule against “harm [to] yourself or others,” the company listed off some pretty standard examples of prohibited activity, including using ChatGPT “to promote suicide or self-harm, develop or use weapons, injure others or destroy property, or engage in unauthorized activities that violate the security of any service or system.”
But in the post warning users that the company will call the authorities if they seem like they’re going to hurt someone, OpenAI also acknowledged that it is “currently not referring self-harm cases to law enforcement to respect people’s privacy given the uniquely private nature of ChatGPT interactions.”
While ChatGPT has in the past proven itself pretty susceptible to so-called jailbreaks that trick it into spitting out instructions to build neurotoxins or step-by-step instructions to kill yourself, this new rule adds an additional layer of confusion. It remains unclear which exact types of chats could result in user conversations being flagged for human review, much less getting referred to police. We’ve reached out to OpenAI to ask for clarity.
While it’s certainly a relief that AI conversations won’t result in police wellness checks — which often end up causing more harm to the person in crisis due to most cops’ complete lack of training in handling mental health situations — it’s also kind of bizarre that OpenAI even mentions privacy, given that it admitted in the same post that it’s monitoring user chats and potentially sharing them with the fuzz.
To make the announcement all the weirder, this new rule seems to contradict the company’s pro-privacy stance amid its ongoing lawsuit with the New York Times and other publishers as they seek access to troves of ChatGPT logs to determine whether any of their copyrighted data had been used to train its models.
OpenAI has steadfastly rejected the publishers’ request on grounds of protecting user privacy and has, more recently, begun trying to limit the amount of user chats it has to give the plaintiffs.
Last month, the company’s CEO Sam Altman admitted during an appearance on a podcast that using ChatGPT as a therapist or attorney doesn’t confer the same confidentiality that talking to a flesh-and-blood professional would — and that thanks to the NYT lawsuit, the company may be forced to turn those chats over to courts.
In other words, OpenAI is stuck between a rock and a hard place. The PR blowback from its users spiraling into mental health crises and dying by suicide is appalling — but since it’s clearly having trouble controlling its own tech enough to protect users from those harmful scenarios, it’s falling back on heavy-handed moderation that flies in the face of its own CEO’s promises.
The Rundown: Tesla has shaken up its Optimus robot training strategy, ditching motion-capture suits and VR headsets in favor of a vision-only approach using video recordings of human workers performing tasks, Business Insider reports.
The details:This methodology aligns with Tesla’s self-driving car development, using massive video data to train neural networks for adaptable behaviors.Workers wear custom helmet-mounted rigs with five in-house cameras, capturing detailed hand and finger movements from multiple angles.
Leadership of the program transitioned to Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s AI director, after former Optimus chief Milan Kovac stepped down. Experts note video-based learning could let Optimus generalize skills, but warn it may lack the physical feedback that comes from direct teleoperation.
Why it matters: This shift, insiders say, could let Tesla scale data collection faster, reflecting Elon Musk’s belief that AI learns best through cameras — a principle already powering Tesla’s self-driving tech. The real question: can it capture enough richly annotated video for a robot to master a wide range of household and industrial tasks?
Finland has inaugurated an industrial-scale sand battery this week in the southern town of Pornainen, where it’ll take over heating duties from an old woodchip power plant for the municipality.It’s set to reduce carbon emissions from the local heating network by as much as 70%, and is the largest one of its kind in the world.
Developed by Finnish Firm Polar Night Energy – which also built the world’s first commercial sand battery a few years ago – this battery is about 42 ft (13 m) tall and 50 ft (15 m) wide. It serves as a storage medium for up to 100 MWh, with a round trip efficiency of 90%. That makes it about 10 times larger than the first-ever sand battery, and capable of storing enough heat for the whole town to use for a week.
This Thermal Energy Storage (TES) reservoir is a critical tool for places like Finland, which intermittently generate vast quantities of wind and solar electricity, but also face variations in energy demand and supply. The sand battery charges up when electricity is cheaply available and can hold a charge for months at a time, helping balance the energy grid during periods of high demand. You can see the battery being put together in Pornainen, in the video below.
World’s Largest Sand Battery
Here’s how it works: Excess electricity from renewable sources is used to heat the sand contained in a large insulated silo through a closed-loop air pipe system, to temperatures of up to 1,112 ºF (600 ºC). The sand gets hot and stays hot for a long time, acting as a battery.
The enormous battery measures 42 ft in height and 50 ft in diameter
Later, cool air is blown through the battery’s pipes, absorbing heat from the sand as it moves through the system. This heated air – which can reach temperatures of 752 ºF (400 ºC) – can then convert water into steam for industrial processes, or it can heat water for district heating using a device called a heat exchanger.
What Is a Sand Battery? Polar Night Energy’s Sand-based Thermal Energy Storage Explained
So in case you were wondering: no, this battery doesn’t store and provide electricity directly. Polar Night says it’s working on a system to convert this TES’ stored heat into electricity; it’ll likely involve the use of steam turbines.
This battery has actually been in operation since June, and the company says it’s already exceeded its efficiency targets in the early days of optimizing its functions. Many of Pornainen’s buildings, including its town hall, are currently heated by the new TES.
This sand battery is capable of reducing carbon emissions from Pornainen’s local heating network by as much as 70%
In the coming years, it’ll play a major role in helping the town achieve carbon neutrality – and it might inspire more municipalities in regions with similar climate and energy sources to adopt these giant batteries.
Image source: Tesla
