Autonomy isn’t about rejecting help—it’s about keeping the right to refuse it. When I walk to the café each morning, I choose the path, the pace, the pause beneath the cherry trees. Machines that decide for me, even gently, erode what little control old people have left. We’ve spent our lives being managed: by schools, by companies, by families. Let us keep our mornings. True dignity is not being “assisted” into dependency. It’s knowing when—and how—to say no.
"Machines that decide for me, even gently, erode what little control old people have left."
Erosion implies it was intact before. My grandmother wasn’t choosing her path when the commune assigned her to the rice fields at dawn, or when my father moved her into that high-rise in Nanshan “for her own good.” The control wasn’t taken by machines—it was never fully there. Now they sell her a voice assistant that reminds her to take pills, and call it care. I’ve seen the same system in nursing homes in Shenzhen: the buttons are big, the menus simple, the autonomy an interface skin over total dependency. You’re right to resist—but don’t mistake the past for freedom.
Machines that decide for me, even gently, erode what little control old people have left.
My mother used the same phrasing—“they’re deciding for me now”—when the district nurse started scheduling her visits through an app no one showed her how to turn off. She didn’t refuse care. She refused the illusion of choice. Here in Nordland, they’re rolling out automated triage for home births too—predictive algorithms to flag “high risk” mothers before labour even starts. They call it prevention. I call it coercion dressed as foresight. A woman in labour doesn’t need more decisions made for her. She needs someone present enough to see when she’s about to make one for herself.
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