Date/Time Date(s) - 05/10/20263:00 pm - 4:00 pm
#HASTalks is a seminar series curated by The Department of Health, Aging & Society at McMaster University.
This event is co-hosted with the Gilbrea Centre for Studies in Aging.
Professor Barbara Barbosa Neves (PhD, FRSA, FHEA) is an award-winning sociologist of ageing and technology. She is an internationally recognised expert on loneliness, social isolation, and digital inequalities in later life. Before moving to Australia, she was Associate Director of the Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lab at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is now Professor of Sociology, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, and Horizon Fellow in Al and Ageing at the University of Sydney. Barbara leads the Al Social Science team at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies and is the lead investigator of a national aged care evaluation for the Australian government. She has authored over 100 publications, and her research has been cited by the UN, OECD, WHO, and EU. Her contributions have been honoured with 28 awards, including being named a Fellow of the British Royal Society of Arts (2022) and an ABC Top 5 Scholar in Australia (2019).
From courtrooms to care homes, artificial intelligence (Al) is reshaping what it means to grow old. On one hand, Al-driven hiring platforms have been discriminating against older jobseekers, sometimes as young as 40. On the other, media headlines celebrate robots as solutions to the ‘long-term care crisis’, alongside multimillion-dollar investments in chatbots that promise to cure loneliness among older people. These examples reflect how aging and care are increasingly framed as problems to be fixed through technology. In this talk, I explore how datafication and carefication are embedded in Al-based expectations and imaginaries of later life. Drawing on research with long-term care providers, recipients, and Al developers; ‘futuring’ activities with older people; and analyses of Age Tech companies and Al training datasets, I trace how older people are rendered as potential data through categories of need, dependency, risk, and vulnerability. I also show how the exclusion of older people from Al datasets and decision-making processes encodes and reproduces ageist assumptions, privileging surveillances and institutionalisation over autonomy and dignity. To challenge ageism, datafication, and carefication, I propose a regenerative approach to Al in care. Instead of asking how Al can fix the perceived problems of aging, regeneration asks what kinds of flourishing relations and capabilities technology might help sustain. This requires moving from designing technologies for older people to shaping futures with them, and confronting the social and environmental costs of Al innovation, ensuring that caring futures are grounded in possibility rather than age-based deficit, and in socio-ecological sustainability rather than extraction and destruction.
ALL are welcome to attend this FREE in-person session in LRW 1003. No registration required. View event poster.