ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the call to automate care work with robot caregivers to overcome the future scarcity of care providers. The chapter reveals how this speculative solution detours around the problem that care work is produced by a disproportionately large number of exploited, immigrant, and racialized women of color. The chapter argues that what takes the form of a simple supply-and-demand problem is in truth a mystified expression of political choices about the social value of elderly life beyond the wage labor market, about whose labor is valued and counts as fully human, and about who gets to be a full member of the American community.
