Gotta get me one of them Suicide Bears

Here’s the story:

Yesterday one of the Patheos bloggers, Seasons of Grace,  linked to an article on iflscience.org describing a “Suicide Bear” — a robot invented in Japan to provide assisted suicide to the elderly, allowing them to chose from multiple mechanisms for suicide, from suffocation to strangulation to lethal injection, all done in an automated fashion at the touch of a button.  The article states that this is all for the purpose of providing suicide options to the elderly, and implies that suicide is recognized as a right, which health care professionals are obliged to provide.

Now, this didn’t seem particularly credible, though I’d had plenty of facebook-friends link to iflscience, so I suspected that that site, rather than being a hoax site, was fooled by some other hoax site that they themselves didn’t credit.  Turns out, according to snopes.com, the trick is that the “.org” iflscience is a hoax site intended to mimic in appearance the real “.com” iflscience site.   (Even instapundit.com was taken in until readers pointed this out.)

Now, the real “Suicide Bear” is, per the press release Snopes links to, actually a robot intended to help the elderly in nursing homes, who may have some capacity to stand, with help, get from a bed to a wheelchair.  And this, this I want —  for Dad, of course — though it looks like it needs a couple generations more of development before it’s able to pick up an elderly person who has (arrrgh!) fallen off the bed, rather than just helping them up off a chair.  But the whole issue of costs for caring for the elderly?  So many of the tasks involved are embarrassing for the individuals themselves — who wants a nurse to wipe your bottom? — and if a robot, rather than a person, could perform these tasks, and the caregivers actually provide human interaction instead, it would provide greater privacy, and a greater feeling of dignity to the individuals themselves (and as a bonus limit the anticipated growth in personnel required!).

But we know that Japan has a serious problem with an imbalance due to an aging population and an unsustainably-low birth rate, and they’ve chosen not to import the next generation of “Japanese,” both out of a racism in the population and a feeling that, in a way, it would be meaningless to keep a country called “Japan” in existence if its new residents are not actually Japanese, both in terms of ancestry and culture.  Which may or may not be particularly wise, and Japan has plenty of problems, and I sure as heck am glad I’m not Japanese (see here for a book I read a while back).

And, even though Japan is actually leading the way in robotics research in large degree, as I understand, motivated by the desire to automate certain tasks involved in care for the elderly, our Western perception of their collectivist culture, as well as the increasing chorus of support for assisted suicide for all manner of reasons, and knowledge of their imbalance of elderly and their high suicide rate in general, makes it easy to believe that Japan has moved much further in the direction of routinizing a “Release to Elsewhere” than previously known.

So what is going on in Japan?  According to Wikipedia, there exists a very limited legal framework for euthanasia:  severe pain, unrelievable by any means, approaching death, and ability to actively consent are all required.  How successful has the country been in holding to these very narrow grounds?  Looking at google, irritatingly enough, the Suicide Bear shows up for all the top hits for Japan assisted suicide, and successive hits are all just mentions of Japan in lists of countries where assisted suicide is not illegal, or other cases where Japan shows up in an extraneous fashion due to a separate story on the same page.

On the other hand, when it comes to suicide of the elderly, in Japan and in East Asia in general, there is a rather high, and growing rate, according to this article from the Global Post, but it is viewed as a mental health problem to be treated, not a solution to demographic imbalances.

So why are we so willing to believe that our future is one of Soylent Green, or Release to Elsewhere, or Suicide Bears?  And is this really the path we’re on?  As is often the case, I thought if I rambled on for long enough, I’d come to a conclusion, but no such luck, so it’s an exercise for the reader.