Letter to the Editor – Washington Post

(If you are new, the Start Here  page is the best place to get oriented. It explains the Trail Markers and the larger journey behind this work.)

 

To the Editor:

I read your recent article, “How America’s seniors are confronting the dizzying world of AI” with interest, and eventually disappointment. While the piece itself offered moments of nuance, the headline and accompanying photo leaned into a tired narrative: that older adults are overwhelmed by technology and struggling to keep up.

As someone who’s lived through every major tech transition since the Timex Sinclair and the Commodore 64, I find this portrayal reductive. Those of us in GenX as well as many Boomers alike—have not only adapted to new technologies, we’ve created them and helped usher them in time and time again.

We’ve played Pong and 7 other generations of video games, coded in COBOL, survived our parents mistakingly thinking the PCjr and Intellivision would dominate the market and taught ourselves hundreds of new tools while raising families and reinventing careers. Anyone else ever try a Sharp Wizard?

AI isn’t dizzying. It’s familiar. It’s just the next chapter in a long story of adaptation and curiosity, not that much different from the time period when Bryant Gumble and the rest of us didn’t yet know what the World Wide Web was and email was, and that turned out ok! What’s truly dizzying is the persistent assumption that age equals obsolescence, especially by someone who probably thinks Tic Tok fluency is the same thing as tech literacy.

What I can tell you is that everyone has trouble identifying AI photos and AI videos, including my digital native children, and it will only get more difficult for users of all ages as the “tells” become less and less obvious. Not every video is as easy as the Bigfoot memes, try watching the short film Kira, by Hashem Al-Ghali. He made it for about $500 in 12 days. 

As far as scams, while seniors tend to lose more money than other age groups, the numbers show they fall for similar numbers of scams. Maybe we aren’t more gullible, we just have a bigger retirement account!

Obviously, seniors with dementia and other diseases that affect their cognitive skills are targets, but let’s be real, that wasn’t the population the Post was writing about.

I use AI regularly, mostly at work, where we’ve gone through training in just the last 6 months. It wasn’t particularly challenging training, certainly no harder than Excel was the first time. I use it write welcome messages to post on our intranet to introduce new hires, to proofread emails, organize my thoughts, and analyze data.

I’m not alone. What we bring to this moment isn’t confusion, it’s context and a lifetime of experience with new tools and challenges. This experience helps us ask better questions. We know when to trust and when to verify.

So, let’s retire the squinting-at-screens stock photos and the headlines that infantilize. Seniors aren’t confronting AI; we’re conversing with it. And in many cases, we’re outsmarting and outperforming younger workers who aren’t quite so used to the volume of change that we’ve seen over the years. We’ve been adapting longer than they’ve been alive.

Sincerely, Eric K