Tech gadgets meet ignored elders

Time magazine had the difficult balancing act of celebrating innovation — in the form of best inventions of 2017 — while also documenting our nation’s deplorable elder care system.

For gadgets, “Jibo,” a $999 pet robot that costs 10 times as much as Amazon’s Echo and aims to be 10 times cuter with its swiveling, “Pixar”-like body, earned a spot on Time’s cover.

But despite its six microphones and facial recognition technology, “Jibo” can do little to help our nation’s elderly in assisted living and hospice care. For that, we have Time’s thorough — though often tough-toread — reporting.

“At stake are the health, wealth and dignity of a generation,” Haley Sweetland Edwards writes, referring to the 76 million baby boomer generation.

New Yorker editors also prowled around death’s door with a technological angle for this week’s issue — but with dramatically different results.

Apparently, cold cases may soon become hot, thanks to an algorithm that discovers links between unsolved murders, indicating serial killers on the loose.

The liberal weekly tells us homicide archivist Thomas Hargrove has cataloged 751,785 murders in the US since 1976, and with the help of an algorithm he developed in 2010 and a board comprised of former detectives and a forensic psychologist, he hopes to help police in cracking murder cases.