 One reason why the issue of care has come to the fore is that people have argued that we will need robots in ageing societies. This argument makes problematic assumptions, namely that with longer lifespan people will need more care, and that it will not be possible to attract more humans to caring professions. It may also show a bias about age (Jecker forthcoming). Most importantly, it ignores the nature of automation, which is not simply about replacing humans, but about allowing humans to work more efficiently. It is not very clear that there really is an issue here since the discussion mostly focuses on the fear of robots de-humanising care, but the actual and foreseeable robots in care are assistive robots for classic automation of technical tasks. They are thus “care robots” only in a behavioural sense of performing tasks in care environments, not in the sense that a human “cares” for the patients. It appears that the success of “being cared for” relies on this intentional sense of “care”, which foreseeable robots cannot provide. If anything, the risk of robots in care is the absence of such intentional care—because less human carers may be needed. Interestingly, caring for something, even a virtual agent, can be good for the carer themselves (Lee et al. 2019). A system that pretends to care would be deceptive and thus problematic—unless the deception is countered by sufficiently large utility gain (Coeckelbergh 2016). Some robots that pretend to “care” on a basic level are available (Paro seal) and others are in the making. Perhaps feeling cared for by a machine, to some extent, is progress for come patients.