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Short abstract

Communicative AI is increasingly anticipated as a solution for healthy and independent ageing at home. In doing so, it not only structures everyday life into rhythmic patterns, but also (re)configures affective atmospheres and spatio-temporal arrangements.

Long abstract

As part of the discourse around the challenges of demographic ageing on health and social care services, communicative AI (ComAI) is presented as a promising approach to support “healthy” ageing. The main focus lies in supporting ageing in place, through ambient assisted living, voice assistance and patient monitoring for risk management. Policy makers and developers thereby shape anticipations of ageing “well", increasingly framing it as both an individual responsibility and an economic resource (Martinson & Berridge, 2015). Since these anticipations are tied to norms and practices negotiated in older adults’ everyday lives, ComAI is mobilised to manage health, take over care tasks, and to quantify and ‘discipline’ ageing bodies – ideally enabling independent living. However, two questions remain: Which ageing bodies are being addressed? And whose anticipations of the future come to define how ageing in place is being designed and enacted?

This contribution examines how ComAI structures daily life into rhythmic temporal patterns (Lefebvre, 2004), focusing on the “meantime” (Masquelier and Durham, 2023) as a state of in-betweenness in which anticipated futures of ageing are translated into everyday practices and spatio-temporal arrangements. The meantime is inhabited by human and more-than-human actors and serves as a transitional phase in which home environments and emerging affective atmospheres are being negotiated.

Based on ethnographic and participatory fieldwork in Austria and UK, we are interested in how older adults experience, appropriate or resist ComAI in their everyday lifes, as well as the affective, technological and spatio-temporal entanglements that emerge (Dalmer et al., 2022).