BRITAIN’S healthcare crisis has been catapulted centre stage recently as our beloved NHS warriors battle Covid-19 deprived of personal protective equipment.

Yet these indispensable heroes have long toiled exhausting hours, struggling under a lethal concoction of heightened demand and a lack of resources, a Brexodus of staff and the coronavirus pandemic is just icing on the crumbling cake. 

Vacancies are widespread. In social care, it is estimated shortages have spiralled to 122,000.

Thousands of retirees have flocked to the NHS front lines these past few weeks, but once Britain returns to some degree of normality, the post-Brexit immigration plan swoops in to exacerbate the vacancies once more.

Migrant healthcare staff will face exorbitant visa fees as soon as December while care workers flatly won’t even qualify for a skilled worker visa. 

However, the Home Office has designed a rather unorthodox and arguably unscrupulous alternative: to replace the grit and graft of flesh-and-blood migrant staff with artificial intelligence and automated robots. 

Already the initiative has swallowed £284 million all in all, but the government will need to pluck some more golden leaves from its “magic money tree” if it is to realistically transform sectors that are reliant on EU labour with automation in nine months’ time.

Still, the practicality of this mission when the Home Office is notorious at underdelivering and delaying projects is one thing when there is a hot debate over whether “care robots” should be wheeled in at all. 

The inclusion of technology in healthcare is often framed as a step towards depravity: it invokes a consensus that society inches towards a dystopian nightmare where humans become enslaved to sentient androids, 15m jobs become sacrificed at the altar of an AI-modified world and military killer machines surpass human intelligence to bring a nuclear winter to the human race.

Stephen Hawking himself did warn us of this possibility — as have Google employees who walked out in defiance of AI warfare. 

Still, job losses seem quite inevitable, but should this be an acceptable consequence of progress?

Labour MP Yvette Cooper argued that a technological revolution could further entrench the stark inequalities that already exist in Britain and make extreme poverty a permanent part of our social fabric.

And she isn’t wrong: Japan, at the core of technological enlightenment, has seen automation overthrow multiple industries with robot-run hotels, restaurants and conveyor belts of food being common. 

Yet others, tech giants and their allies of dreamers, envision a post-work utopia where tech bridges societies into a new world of “fully automated luxury communism” and where its gains are shared equally by all.

On this note, it is ironic that Covid-19 has pressed the Home Office to make a dramatic U-turn from its submissive acceptance of job losses.

Commiting to pay 80 per cent of workers’ wages who are most likely to become affected by automation in the next 20 years might seem like a change of heart, but sceptics might best believe that the infrastructure for automation just simply isn’t ready yet — and the cogs are still needed to keep the economy oiled up until this point. 

In terms of healthcare, however, there are additional concerns.

AI still bitterly lacks the empathy required for the job while algorithms are shown to absorb the darkest depths of human biases.

AI systems can only look at the world through the peripheral granted to it by its makers who, by and large, are mostly male and white.

The result has seen recognition software repeatedly misinterpret facial expressions and body language on the assumption that everyone expresses themselves in the same way as Westerners while AI favours men over women in job interviews and even prefers European-American names over African-American ones.

Not that the government pays much attention to this acute factor: it’s very own visa algorithm has been found to discriminate against applicants of a certain nationality.

At a very basic level, one would expect “care robots” to be equipped to administer some form of care.

Yet humanoids lack the intellectual problem-solving and altruism needed to adhere to physically demanding and emotionally intuitive surroundings.

At best, they can dance, entertain, push a tray of food and deliver medication to a specified destination.

But they are defunct of tactile touch. It cannot brush hair, dry tears or offer a hand to hold with comforting words in the darkest of days.

It cannot compute the nuances of human emotion and speech. Social care was ranked as one of the least automatable jobs of all in only 2016 as a result, but others just flatly find “care robots” to camp in the category of undignified.

Only 26 per cent of respondents to a survey said they would feel comfortable being hoisted and attended to by a robot when in care or a hospital, and many understandably have concerns around camera-fitted and potentially hackable devices in the rise of “spy cam” pornography. 

However, the coronavirus pandemic may have considerably shaken the narrative and has, by twist of fate in the government’s favour, propelled the case for AI in British healthcare forward.

Technology has undoubtedly played a vital role in this unparalleled era of segregation; FaceTiming loved ones, YouTube yoga classes, Skype work conferences and live-streamed concerts and theatre shows have kept Britons indoors while still relatively connected and entertained as before.

Yet even further afield, AI has become pivotal in delaying the spread of Covid-19.

In one hospital at the heart of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, robots outnumbered doctors as they patrolled the corridors, disinfected areas and monitored patients’ temperature and overall wellbeing.

The CEO behind this remarkable technology argued that “robots do not carry disease, and robots can be easily disinfected.”

Other countries, such as Singapore, Iran and Israel, have resorted to far more draconian invasions on civil liberties through the use of tech.

Yet “spy” mobile tracking apps and ramped-up surveillance have proved paramount in curbing the death toll — and a similarly designed app by the NHS may be coming to Britain in the next few weeks.

Even so, care robots overseas appear quite revolutionary.

Consider Pepper, a humanoid bot, that is able to entertain residents with knitting and exercise classes in care homes and help the staff with mundane tasks.

The therapeutic cuddly seal, Paro, has been proven to soothe Alzheimer’s sufferers.

Kirobo by Toyota similarly comforts childless adults; RoBear can physically lift patients from wheelchairs and Leka can break through barriers to communicate with autistic children.

Already the NHS uses digital aides which can outperform human hands and eyes in intricate surgeries and when detecting breast cancer and the early onset of Alzehimer’s disease. 

Evidently, tech can be a force for good if executed right. The University of Oxford, McKinsey Global Institute, PwC and Shift Commission predict that although millions of jobs will fall victim to automation, social and healthcare will emerge largely unscathed.

The NHS will still be dominated by human staff, yet tech could vastly alleviate doctors’ attendance to paperwork by 5.7m hours, generating a saving of £13 billion.

Similarly, social care could save £6bn according to surgeon Lord Darzi.

However, the biggest battle for tech remains in public confidence; confidence that has waned in the government as it arbitrarily stifles migration while the frail become collateral damage.

Tech won’t be able to slice through social inequalities for as long as overzealous benefit assessors penalise disabled and vulnerable people for making improvements in their lives.

This move towards automation risks exacerbating the wealth and class division system in Britain and appears little more than another hostile political ploy to warrant the government’s anti-migrant agenda. 

Olivia Bridge is a political correspondent for the Immigration Advice Service, an organisation of Britain and Ireland immigration lawyers.