I guess, but only if you assume elderly people are dumb enough to believe that a thing with no free will paying attention to them means something other than "no actual human wants to pay attention to me."

I guess some elderly people have cognitive decline and might buy this, but I respect elderly people enough not to bet on it.

Fundamentally, in my opinion, you cannot alleviate a human's need for the regard of other humans by substituting a non-human thing whose entire raison d'etre is to step in where it is economically inefficient to put a person. The actual message sent to a human being when you try to pass off an "economically efficient" non-human caretaker or "friend" to them is unmistakably "You do not actually matter to other humans."

I don't think it's that the elderly are "dumb enough" to believe that their robot companion is human... it's that there may be some benefit of even that artificial simulation of companionship compared with having none at all.

I'm sure they know they're not talking to a human, but maybe, even on a tiny subconscious level, if they get even a fraction of that companionship in a simulated way, it is presumably better than the alternative.

Recounting memories from your youth with a robot is not as enjoyable as sharing them with real friends, but maybe it's slightly more engaging than being stuck in a nursing home bed all day by yourself watching TV.

What if the alternative was dispensing with this rotten system that dehumanizes everyone in it, especially the vulnerable, like the elderly?

And what would that alternative look like? Once we “dispense with the rotten system,” then what?

Denmark.

And then there are cats?