Here we are. We’re in the waiting room at Sarawak General Hospital. Today is the usual symphony of anxiety and fluorescent lights. My fourteen-month-old son squirmed in my arms, too young to understand the weight of check-ups but old enough to sense my tension. Across from us, an elderly woman clutched her appointment card, her hands trembling slightly. Not from age, I realised, but from being alone.
A nurse called a name. The woman stood, uncertain, and for a moment I thought she might ask for help. But she didn’t. She shuffled forwards, navigating the maze of corridors by herself, and I wondered: where was her daughter? Her son? Or had they simply assumed she could manage?
Then I remembered the news I’d read that morning. China is deploying humanoid robots to patrol its border with Vietnam: Walker S2 units—adult-sized machines that can guide queues, answer questions, patrol corridors, and watch for patterns that might require human intervention. Thirty-seven million dollars’ worth of them.
The article made it sound efficient. Revolutionary, even. But sitting in that hospital waiting room, watching that woman disappear into the corridor alone, I found myself asking: what happens when we bring those robots here?
The Promise We Believed
I’m a Xennial, born in that strange twilight between analogue childhood and digital adolescence. I remember when my mother took me to the clinic in the 90s, and the doctor still wrote prescriptions by hand, double-checking with the nurse who’d been there for twenty years and knew every patient’s allergies by heart.
I also remember the promise we were sold. Computers would make healthcare better—faster, more accurate. No more lost files, no more handwriting errors, no more human mistakes. We believed it because we’d seen what technology could do. We’d watched the internet connect the world, seen information democratised, distance collapsed.
We thought healthcare would be next. And it was. Just not in the way we imagined.
What We Actually Got
The robots haven’t arrived in hospitals yet—not really. But the digital transformation has. The doctor who spends more time looking at the screen than at my son. The nurse who apologises because the system is down. The AI chatbot that asks me to describe symptoms before I’m allowed to speak to a human. The portal that’s supposed to empower patients but mostly just shifts the burden of navigation on to people who are sick, scared, and alone.
We called this progress. We measured it in efficiency gains and cost reductions. We never measured what we lost.
The nurse who used to remember my name now sees twice as many patients per shift. The doctor who used to take time to explain things now has performance metrics tied to consultation duration. The receptionist who helped confused elderly patients has been replaced by a kiosk with a touchscreen that doesn’t respond to trembling hands.
And now they want to bring in the robots.
The Logic of More
Not because the digital transformation solved our problems, but because it created new ones—and the solution to technology’s failures is always more technology. We couldn’t make the kiosks work for elderly patients, so now we’ll deploy robots to help them use the kiosks. We couldn’t make electronic health records improve doctor–patient relationships, so now we’ll deploy AI to analyse the data we spent twenty years digitising.
Here’s the bridge we’re not seeing: borders and hospitals aren’t that different any more. Both are now about throughput, processing, efficiency metrics. Both have decided that what matters most can be measured, optimised, automated. A border crossing processes travellers; a hospital processes patients. The vocabulary gives it away.
The Walker S2 units will patrol hospital corridors, watching for falls, guiding patients to departments, answering questions about visiting hours. They’ll work with minimal downtime through autonomous battery swapping. They’ll prove, as the article boasts, “real-world value and the accelerating commercialisation of humanoid robots globally”.
There it is again. Commercialisation.
Here’s what my 90s self understood that we seem to have forgotten: technology is just a tool. It amplifies intent. If your intent is to care for people, technology can help you do that better. But if your intent is to extract profit, to optimise costs, to maximise throughput, technology will help you do that too.
The question isn’t whether robots can do the job. It’s whose job we’re asking them to do.
Built for Control
When I look at Walker S2 robots patrolling borders—checking IDs, confirming seals, relaying status updates—I see tools built for control. For surveillance. For processing people as efficiently as cargo containers. These aren’t caregiving machines accidentally assigned to border duty. They’re control machines being repurposed for care.
And we’re supposed to believe that won’t matter.
My son’s appointment ended. The doctor was kind, thorough, human. She knelt to his level, made eye contact with his wide toddler eyes, and answered my questions about developmental milestones with patience. She even smiled when he grabbed at her stethoscope—that universal fourteen-month-old impulse to touch everything.
She did this despite the system demanding her attention elsewhere. Despite the performance metrics. Despite the screen. Despite every incentive designed to make her move faster, see more patients, optimise her time.
She did it because she remembered why she became a doctor in the first place.
But how much longer can we ask humans to fight their tools just to do their jobs with dignity?
The Digital Zen Paradox
This is the paradox we refuse to face: the more we optimise for efficiency, the more we lose what actually matters. The more we automate care, the less caring we become. The more we measure what’s easy to measure, the more we miss what’s essential but unmeasurable.
The hand that holds yours when you’re frightened. The voice that says you’re doing fine; it’s confusing the first time. The smile that meets a toddler’s curiosity with warmth instead of impatience. These aren’t bugs in the healthcare system waiting to be fixed with better technology.
They’re the system. They’re the whole point.
But they don’t show up in efficiency reports. They can’t be automated. They don’t scale. They’re messy and human and irreducibly analogue in a world that’s decided analogue is obsolete.
In the 90s, we thought the internet would set information free. We thought digital tools would empower individuals against institutions. We thought technology would make the world more human, not less.
We were naive. But we weren’t entirely wrong.
The technology did what we designed it to do. We just didn’t ask the right questions first. We didn’t think about who would control it, who would profit from it, who would bear the cost of our optimisation.
The Questions That Matter
Now we’re making the same mistake, but with higher stakes. Not just information systems, but physical robots that will patrol our hospitals, our borders, our public spaces. Machines that will decide who gets attention and who gets processed. Algorithms that will determine which human needs deserve human care and which can be handled by a Walker S2 unit with autonomous battery swapping.
They’re already writing the guidelines. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued them in 2023. Other countries will follow. The robots will come. The future isn’t a question of if, but how—and more importantly, for whom.
The alternative to blind acceptance isn’t Luddite rejection. It’s not smashing machines or pretending we can return to handwritten prescriptions. The alternative is intention: the discipline to ask, before we deploy each new technology, what are we optimising for? Who does this serve? What are we willing to sacrifice? And is the efficiency we gain worth more than the humanity we lose?
Those are uncomfortable questions. They slow things down. They interfere with adoption rates and the accelerating pace of innovation. They require us to value things that don’t appear on balance sheets.
They’re also the only questions that matter.
The Future We’re Choosing
My son will grow up in the world we’re building right now. He’s only fourteen months old, still learning to walk, still discovering that the world extends beyond our living room. And someday, decades from now, he’ll sit in a hospital waiting room with his own child, and a robot will efficiently guide them to the right department, and he’ll wonder: was this what we wanted?
I want him to remember that there was a choice. That once, when he was barely more than a baby, a doctor smiled when he grabbed at her stethoscope. That once, we understood the difference between processing people and caring for them. That once, before we automated everything that could be automated, we asked whether we should.
But I’m not sure he’ll remember. Because the window for asking is closing. The robots are coming. The guidelines are being written. The future is being decided by people who measure success in efficiency gains and cost reductions and the accelerating commercialisation of humanoid robots globally.
And the rest of us? We’re sitting in waiting rooms, watching it happen, clutching our appointment cards, wondering if anyone will notice when we need help finding our way.
The Question Beneath the Question
The question beneath the question isn’t whether robots can patrol hospital corridors.
It’s whether we’ve confused the map for the territory—whether we’ve become so obsessed with optimising the systems that we’ve forgotten what the systems were for.
And the question beneath that: what do we do when we finally remember, and discover it’s too late to choose differently?
‘For the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.’ — Francis Weld Peabody (1881–1927), an American physician and Harvard Medical School professor, best remembered for championing humanistic, patient-centred medicine. He was a highly regarded teacher of medicine at Harvard, and his writing is still widely assigned to medical students.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
