When Robots are more Incarnational than Humans
Reflections on how social robots can help contribute to healing
Dear Paid Subscribers,
Thank you for investing your time and monetary support into my writings and reflections! It means a lot. So, I’d like to share some thoughts I have in the field that I’m pursuing a PhD in, as well as some other theological reflections that I wouldn’t otherwise feel open to share to the general public. Over the next 4 years, I’ll be embarking on a journey of exploration that offers ethical reflection about how we implement social robots into different aspects of our lives from in-home robots to therapy robots. Here are the beginnings of some of those thought processes…
Incarnational Robots
When I was at a conference a couple weeks back, there was a line I heard that’s been swimming around in my head ever since: “Robots are already serving the margins the Church struggles to reach.” This should be convicting for the Christian community. As Christians, we believe it’s our duty to be present in authentic and intentional ways. It’s at the core of our theology. God became incarnate as a human in order to be present with us. Hebrews 4:15 tells us, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.” Because of this, we are also called to be intentionally present with those whom God has entrusted to us. The current fear around robots is that they’re taking our jobs. But what if they’re taking our calling?
As Christians, it’s our job to take care of those who are the most marginalized of our communities. It’s sad that I spent time trying to use another word other than “marginalized” due to how politically charged it is these days, but it’s the word that’s most intuitive when I read the Gospels and the writers that reflected on them. Jesus went out of his way to meet with people at the margins of society: Samaritans, Lepers, Prostitutes, the homeless. James 1:27 tells us that, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress…” Time and time again God commissions the Israelites, and Christians by extension, to care for the orphan, widow, and foreigner. What’s God communicating? Take care of those whom society struggles to look after.
There’s a loneliness epidemic for the elderly population. On average, only about 30-40% of those in living facilities report a visitor “about weekly.” Most others reported about once of month, if that.1 On top of this, social robots are being used for children with ASD as well as those with diagnosed anxiety disorders in order to more creatively bridge the divide between patient and the world they struggle to interact with. There has been much success in decreasing loneliness, distress, and anxiety, and increasing confidence and social interaction when social robots like paro and emobie (pictured below) are implemented in living facilities or even within the therapeutic process.2 In comes that haunting line that I mentioned in the beginning. So, what do we do?
Pic of Paro the Seal from parorobots.com
Pic of QTrobot from https://luxai.com/
Christian Action
I’m not a complete naysayer when it comes to implementing robotics into different layers of our society. There should still be a conversation around “where” and “when” to introduce such technology. When it comes to health care, I’m not completely opposed as long as it becomes complementary, or even supplemental at times, with human interaction instead of completely supplemental. When it becomes completely supplemental, we’ve lost our ability to be incarnational. Sometimes, the need is so great that social robots are necessary for a time in order for humanity to figure out a plan to fill in the gap.
Take Japan. It’s population has been shrinking and on the decline for 16 consecutive years. They’ve tried everything from large child tax credits to free healthcare until the age of 18 in some areas.3 For over a decade, Japan has sold more adult diapers than baby diapers. As the older generation quickly outpaces the younger, care for the elderly becomes too much of a burden to bear. In situations like this, social robots would become a necessity until Japan can figure out how to raise its repopulation rate. Not only in elderly care, but for those with intense social anxiety, social robots have shown great promise to help ameliorate distress and raise confidence in human-to-human interactions.4 Because of the financial burden of healthcare costs, such technologies could help reduce that burden as more assistive technology gets introduced into sectors like mental health.
Conclusions
I’m not sure I have any to offer at the moment except to encourage optimism and tread cautiously. As AI systems get introduced into these technologies, these processes can become more efficient and effective. There also is a risk of privacy depending on who has access to these AI systems, how well they cooperate with the users, where its servers are, and the security of the information it retains. Closed systems seem like the safer place to tread at the moment, but one may be sacrificing effectiveness for the sake of privacy.
In the end, this should make Christian communities jump in to meet this need and think deeply about why there is such a need in the first place. If we’re outraged by robots taking our jobs, we should be more outraged by robots taking our calling. Our calling is to live incarnationally. If we can’t do that well in the moment, social robots may be the temporary means by which people can experience healing.
Joseph E. Gaugler, “Family Involvement in Residential Long-Term Care: A Synthesis and Critical Review,” Aging & Mental Health 9, no. 2 (March 2005): 105–18, accessed May 19, 2026, PubMed Central
Dautenhahn, Kerstin. “Socially Intelligent Robots: Dimensions of Human–Robot Interaction.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362, no. 1480 (2007): 679–704. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2247412/.
Becca Faber, “Improved Immigration: Japan’s Solution to Its Population Crisis,” Harvard International Review, October 30, 2024, accessed May 19, 2026, https://hir.harvard.edu/improved-immigration-japan
Lindsey Arnold, “EmobieTM: A Robot Companion for Children with Anxiety,” in 2016 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) (Piscataway, NJ: IEEE, 2016), 413–14, https://doi.org/10.1109/HRI.2016.7451782