02.07.11
Artisan economy: Make stuff for the old, wealthy and enfeebled who don’t think they’re enfeebled
Every once in a while a big newspaper sends someone to MIT where they visit a lab said to be engaged in innovation.
With the New York Times, it was MIT’s ‘AgeLab’. Devoted to thinking things up for the haves among the retiring baby-boomers. Not the rest of us who’ll get stuck with the results of a broken economy.
Naturally, it’s full of sickening stuff. Retirement condos where you can store your kayaks. Valets to park your car. A robot that follows you around to nag you to take your pills. Sensors taped to everything in case you fall.
All of my friends have parents who are either dead now or really old. Many of them would be a bit offended by the article seeing that, in the real world, it doesn’t matter if a robot nags you relentlessly to take your pills if your short term memory is gone. Or that computer game puzzles to map your mental decline don’t matter either because there aren’t any things to take to reverse it.
The story, and the people in it, play to those in the upper and upper middle class who believe aging is optional. So there’s really not any innovation in it at all, just annoying applications and widgets for the well to do. Spend a lot for a place that has a robot for everybody while they pay minimum wage to the human old home workers who clean up once you’ve become incontinent.
Here’s the intro. Gee, they are so smart:
It’s not easy being gray.
For the first time ever, getting out of a car is no picnic. My back is hunched. And I’m holding on to handrails as I lurch upstairs.
I’m 45. But I feel decades older because I’m wearing an Age Gain Now Empathy System, developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Agnes, they call it.
At first glance, it may look like a mere souped-up jumpsuit. A helmet, attached by cords to a pelvic harness, cramps my neck and spine. Yellow-paned goggles muddy my vision. Plastic bands, running from the harness to each arm, clip my wingspan. Compression knee bands discourage bending. Plastic shoes, with uneven Styrofoam pads for soles, throw off my center of gravity. Layers of surgical gloves make me all thumbs.
The age-empathy suit comes from the M.I.T. AgeLab, where researchers designed Agnes to help product designers and marketers better understand older adults and create innovative products for them.
At the MIT ‘AgeLab’ they’ve even figured out old people don’t like buying telephones with big buttons. And I bet they didn’t eve have to watch that bit in Gran Torino where Clint Eastwood kicks his grown-up kids out of the birthday party they’ve thrown for him.
Further:
Devices for I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up catastrophes, they say, represent the old business of old age. The new business of old age involves technologies and services that promote wellness, mobility, autonomy and social connectivity. These include wireless pillboxes that transmit information about patients’ medication use, as well as new financial services, like “Second Acts??? from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, that help people plan for longer lives and second careers.
These financial services offer marvelous opportunities for penalty fee collection in that they’re purposefully more confusing to those with diminished mental capacity, bettering the potential for the bank to collect on the natural gaffes and confusion one is prone to in old age.
Bank of America is age friendly.
I guess they didn’t read the news about the BofA $410 million settlement the company’s paying because it used frauds and deceptions to trick people into overdraft fees.
Note this great quote on how corporate America’s thinking only of the coming age of retirees:
“Companies are starting to think about how they can be age friendly much the same way they have been thinking about how they could be environmentally friendly over the last couple of decades,??? says Andy Sieg, the head of retirement services at Bank of America.
“A wireless smart pillbox reminds [someone old] to take her daily vitamins,” reads the story. “A computer on which she plays specific word and number games tracks her daily scores.”
“More than a decade later, with boomers starting to turn 65, experts like [MIT’s] Professor Coughlin hope to make gray the new green,” it concludes.
And then there’s our world. With Ted Nugent and many like him:
Social Security is bloated, broke and busted. FDR’s New Deal turned out to be the Rip-off Deal …
The only way to truly reform Social Security is to sink it. Settling for anything less than the total destruction of this financial sinkhole would be perpetuating the problem and allowing Fedzilla to continue to pick the pockets of future generations of Americans.
We must have the guts and national resolve to remove the crushing tax burden of this Ponzi scheme from the backs of future Americans …
[We] need to raise the retirement age now. It is a fact that people are living longer …
Actually, people who need Social Security aren’t living longer. Only the well off are.
And that’s who the MIT ‘AgeLab’ wants to sell its widgets to. Swell guys.