Aging with Imagination

How does artificial intelligence reshape the experience of aging—and what can we do about it? In their article, published in Big Data & Society, authors Juliane Jarke and Helen Manchester consider how aging populations may come to imagine a future beyond the influence of data-fueled regimes and the ageist assumptions often coupled with addressing demographic aging.

The researchers used participatory futuring workshops—a research method that involves unblocking imaginaries, decision-making, and actions—in Austria, Germany, and the UK to examine how older adults envision what it means to age in a data-driven society. Through a series of prompts related to health technology and critical discussions about participants’ anticipations about getting older, the team shed light on unrealistic expectations about what the future holds. The findings include that the dual forces of policy and AI-driven tech and social media form expectations around aging, often framed around physical and mental decline, dependency, and lowered efficiency. The research team revealed, however, that engagement in group work allows for critical assessments and tempering of these datafied artificial imaginations, bringing people back into the reality of their bodies and everyday lives. In short, participatory workshops allow individuals to collectively imagine futures that they actively create, rather than ones filtered through a regime’s digital daydreams.Participatory workshops allow individuals to collectively imagine futures that they actively create, rather than ones filtered through a regime’s digital daydreams.

Aging isn’t as natural as it seems at first glance—it’s impacted by data-driven predictions sifted through algorithms, policies, and health-based digital tools that inform us what our futures should look like. This study shows how regimes of anticipation can, alternately, limit possibilities or allow people to imagine growing old on their own terms. In doing so, it becomes a call to resist one-size-fits-all frames of aging and allow people to envision what their own future holds.