AI-Ageing Assemblages: Multiplicity, Power, and Boundaries in the Co-Constitution of Ageing and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract Algorithmic technologies and big data infrastructures, commonly known as artificial intelligence (AI), have become increasingly relevant in the lives of older adults. This article seeks to engage with new ways of theorising the relationships between AI and ageing by viewing these relationships not as interventions but as assemblages. We highlight the manifold sociomaterial associations that exist between ageing and AI and empirically explore AI-ageing assemblages through data from a qualitative study that analysed the development, use, and implementation of AI in long-term care. Analysis highlights three bundles of practices through which the relationships between ageing and AI were formed: (1) data practices that positioned an ageing body as an object of value creation for AI development companies, while at the same time reducing this body to a quantifiable object, (2) innovation practices, which narrowed the conceptual space of desirable futures that could be enacted through AI-ageing assemblages to technological futures, and (3) black-boxing practices, which rendered large parts of older adults’ attitudes, identities, and desires in the assemblages invisible. Based on these engagements, the article argues for further integration of assemblage theory in the sociology of ageing. In the concluding discussion, we highlight the potential of such an approach for the sociology of ageing, most importantly by better acknowledging power in its conceptual debates and empirical encounters with AI, underscoring that theorising technology and ageing is, inevitably, a political task.