Short abstract:

I will present preliminary findings from an ethnography of the "Age Tech" sector in the US. Through interviews, observation, and analysis of company documents, public-facing materials, and publications I investigate competing visions within the sector for the future of care, work, and aging.

Long abstract:

The US, like many nations, is in a “crisis of care;” due to aging cohorts, a frayed social safety net, high costs of in-home care, and an underpaid, undervalued homecare workforce, eldercare is increasingly inaccessible (e.g., Abelson & Rios, 2023; Glenn, 2000). The eldercare technology, or “Age Tech,” industry has introduced myriad new technologies – positioning these developments as urgent solutions to the “care crisis.” Existing scholarship has examined how care workers and families navigate surveillant systems that mediate eldercare in the US (e.g., Glaser, 2021; Berridge et al., 2019) and how technologists in Japan envision caring technologies as vehicles for family and state futures (Robertson, 2017; Wright, 2023), but there has been limited research on how professionals within the American “Age Tech” sector envision “the future of care work.” This study draws on ethnographic fieldwork with doctors, technologists, researchers, and entrepreneurs in the industry and analysis of extant materials to answer the following questions: How do these professionals envision the future of care, work, and aging? When and how do these visions come into conflict with one another? And finally, how do they speak about the gendered, racialized homecare workforce who they seek to augment, replace, and/or aid? In my preliminary findings, I argue that competing visions are often at play, even within the same organizations and within individual narratives – members of the “Age Tech” industry alternate between presenting themselves as savvy entrepreneurs tapping into the “longevity economy” and do-gooders providing a necessary service for a social ill.