Caring in both directions. The author with his son on Father's Day.

Robert J. Szczerba

As families care for aging parents and disabled loved ones across distance, the most useful home AI may not look like a robot butler. It may look like quiet support.

Father's Day has a script: ties, grills, golf balls, a card the kids signed in the car. Mine doesn't fit on the card anymore.

Like many of you, I’m a son and a father at the same time, and both jobs are pulling harder than usual. My parents are in their eighties and live in another state, and they need more help than a daily phone call can give. My 21-year-old son is autistic, and his need for care won’t end at a specific birthday. So I sit in the middle, the way a lot of people do now, trying to keep watch over the people I love across too many miles and too few hours.

There’s a second reason this lands hard for me. I work in AI and robotics, and the technology getting all the attention, the humanoid robots folding laundry in demo clips, isn’t what families actually need.

Most of it is the quiet, exhausting work that never makes the greeting card. You text to check whether Dad took his medication. You lie awake doing the math on who looks after your child when you no longer can. And you try, constantly, to keep someone safe at home without turning the house into a hospital.

If that's you, you're in good company. AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving estimate that 63 million Americans are now in a caregiving role, nearly one in four adults. AARP has separately calculated that the unpaid care family caregivers provide is worth more than $1 trillion a year. Most of them would never call themselves caregivers. They'd just say they're looking after their mom, or their dad, or their kid.

What strikes me is how little of our attention goes to this problem. The useful version of the technology is quieter than a robot. It looks like passive sensors instead of a camera in the bedroom, a system that learns someone's routine and flags the change early, alerts smart enough to tell a real fall from a dropped phone, and software that coordinates care across distance instead of handing you one more app to check at midnight.

The best of it feels like being watched over, not watched.

That, to me, is the real test for AI in the home. It isn't whether a robot can perform for a demo or pass for human. It's whether it can help a family hold onto dignity, independence, and a little peace of mind without burying them in false alarms or making care feel colder.

Building that well is the work I do the rest of the year. Today I'm setting the engineering aside. This day belongs to the people all of it is supposed to protect.

So today I'll call my parents, keep an eye on my son, and feel lucky for every ordinary hour that doesn't turn into an emergency. If you're caring in both directions too, I see you.

Happy Father's Day.