Imagine you are thirty, and you return home after a stressful day at work, wishing for a long bath to relax. After soaking in the tub for half an hour, the alarms suddenly go off, and your phone starts ringing. Your family members have been alerted by sensors in your home that you have been in the bathroom for longer than usual. Once the situation settles, you head to the kitchen to have a glass of wine, only to receive a message on your smartwatch warning against it. Your digital assistant reminds you that you’ve had wine in the previous days, which is very bad for your health and may affect your life insurance. You are advised to return the wine to the fridge and head to bed; otherwise, your family and physician will be notified.
This scenario looks far from ideal. But what if the protagonist of the story was eighty? For many, using technology to monitor and control the lives of older adults is often seen as a way to ensure their safety and well-being, even if the price is the constraint of their autonomy. Would this be an instance of paternalism?
In a recent paper, published with Tenzin Wangmo (University of Basel) and Constantin Vica (University of Bucharest) we argue that AI systems for aged care can be paternalistic towards older adults. We start by showing how implicit age biases get embedded in AI technologies, either through designers’ ideologies and beliefs or in the data processed by AI systems. Ageism frequently relies on both positive and negative stereotypes, painting older adults as warm and likable yet also as incompetent, forgetful, and fragile. This blend of stereotypes can elicit complex emotional responses, including feelings of pity and the desire to help, which lead to paternalistic behaviors towards older adults.
We then introduce the concept of technological paternalism and illustrate how it works in practice, by looking at AI for aged care. We show how the design of technology, the portrayal of older adults as potential users, and the collection and processing of data can inadvertently reinforce ageist attitudes through the creation and deployment of paternalistic AI systems for aged care.
The paper can be freely accessed here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03282-0