You can’t hug children with robot arms

What if instead of donating money to aid organizations abroad, you could actually donate your time and compassion right from home, letting you remotely care for children in war-torn countries? That’s what Surrogaid, a new site from the charity War Child, purports to let donors do using pairs of highly controllable robotic arms, allowing them to cook for children, hug them, or rock them to sleep in a crib.

Of course, none of this is actually possible — instead, War Child is using its vision of a strange robot-aided future to remind donors of its actual mission to help children by educating mothers in war-affected areas through teaching them to read and giving them skills useful to earning a living. “A child born to an educated mother is 50 percent more likely to reach their fifth birthday than one who is not,” War Child explains on its website. Rather than remotely controlled robotic childcare, War Child wants actual mothers receiving the support they need to do the work. And according to War Child, the best way to facilitate that isn’t remote donations of care: it’s simple donations of money.