Artificial Intelligence Can Learn From Seniors

Artificial intelligence is built on the assumption that machines can learn. In learning tasks, machines can even teach each other.
Elders are the repository of knowledge and can add much value to AI creations.,
AI creation needs to include various learning approaches and ethical and philosophical input, a hallmark of elder thought.

All too often, when new technological advances make their way into the mainstream, they benefit young adults, who are generally their creators. Sometimes children are the beneficiaries but seldom are elders considered, which matters to me, an elder psychologist. There’s actually an evolutionary reason to explain that.

The ultimate goal of any species is to replicate itself and keep the species alive. So from an evolutionary perspective, adults of reproductive age and their offspring are valued most highly. There has never been an evolutionary role for the long-lived members of a species because they are beyond the reproductive stage of life. But most humans and some animals live well beyond childbearing.

Today, many adults in developed countries can expect at least seventy years and maybe even one hundred.

The Benefits of Senior Input

What is our role then? Certainly, we must provide some benefit to human evolution. And we do. As elders, we collect and transmit our species’ cultural rules and history. Since the beginning of recorded time, we’ve done this—consider shaman or priests’ stories passed on by word of mouth before written language.

Cave drawings communicated hunting rituals and important ideas worth remembering about dangers from nature or other tribes. We, elders, are the repository of knowledge, with brains full of information and how-to skills accumulated over our decades of living. As a generation, we are the experts in problem-solving, able to select new connections between ideas and new ways of doing things from our vast knowledge base.

Wisdom Adds Value to AI Perspective

While older folks don’t have the physical agility or energy of young and middle-aged adults, we make up for it with wisdom—the ability to draw on our accumulated know-how and create novel solutions to everyday problems. On the other end of the age spectrum, young children definitely have creative abilities and haven’t yet internalized learning biases that limit the way they will eventually think. But elders have a unique perspective on how the world works.[…]

Artificial intelligence is built on the assumption that machines can learn. In learning tasks, machines can even teach each other.

Elders are the repository of knowledge and can add much value to AI creations.,

AI creation needs to include various learning approaches and ethical and philosophical input, a hallmark of elder thought.

The Benefits of Senior Input

Wisdom Adds Value to AI Perspective

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