Seasoned adults, born between the years of 1946-1964, are affectionately referred to as the baby boomer generation. And whether we agree with these assertions or not, this is a group who has had attributed characteristics regularly assigned and generalized to them. Some well-known attributed characteristics include positives such as independence, resourcefulness or disciplined . While other group characteristics, depending on who you ask, could potentially be viewed as negatives such as having propensities for being pessimistic, change resistant, or workaholics.
Personally I have no interest in arguing the merits, or lack of, in any of the supposedly ascribed baby boomer group traits. But the idea of identifying and attributing characteristics for subgroups of a population is a strategy often used in statistics. This kind of categorization can at times help statisticians and data professionals to evolve useful and interesting insight into and understanding of relations between groups of subjects, ideas, or even behaviors.
AI Data Underrepresentation
I’d written in a prior post about sources that seem to suggest a lack of available diversity in digital information on seasoned adults when compared to other age groups. Group specific data underrepresentation like this has been discussed as presenting challenges to addressing AI age-based data bias. AI technology depends on the availability of lots of prior knowledge for use to make better and more accurate inferences and predictions.
So why in this post am I discussing the potential existence of seasoned adult data underrepresentation for AI technologies and baby boomer group characteristics? Well, it’s because recently I’ve come across articles written about one additional characteristic attributed to the baby boomer group. And I’m wondering if better understanding of the origins and prevalence of this characteristic could shed some light on this seasoned adult digital data underrepresentation matter. This additionally attributed characteristic is called hoarding.
Hoarding … a good or bad thing?
Hoarding is the act of collecting and storing large amounts of something that is intended for a specific purpose or no specific purpose at all. From what I’ve been reading lately, the baby boomer generation is believed to hold on to and accumulate just about anything and doing so to the extreme. I’ve come across article writers discussing baby boomer hoarding of homes, money, and just about any other of their resources. What’s more, overreaching impacts of baby boomer hoarding has even been the topic of government level roundtable discussions. If there is any merit to this attributed characteristic then it may could be argued that seasoned adults, and even more specifically baby boomers, likely very much understand the power of having access and the means to accumulate massive amounts of stuff.
And what is data gathering, and specifically the digital data gathering needed in support of AI technologies, if not a form of hoarding? AI data gathering entities essentially hoard massive amounts of data and information intended for a specific purpose or no specificity at all AI technology is built at some level on the willingness of its subjects to openly share knowledge, details, and information about themselves, their resources, and their very lives. Could this level of sharing possibly seem counter to a generation that is assumed to value hoarding? Seems I need to keep reading on this one!
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