Aging populations are being ignored in global tech agreements. That comes at a cost.

Widespread dissemination and application of emerging technologies, such as generative artificial intelligence (AI), will bring revolutionary changes to the technological and societal landscapes. The expected changes have spurred global consensus across sectors, including government, civil society, and the private sector, on the need to rapidly ensure that safeguards are in place around these technologies.

In recent years, this rare unity in the global diplomatic and governance architecture has resulted in a number of global agreements. Those include the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence released in 2021, the March 2024 United Nations resolution on “Seizing the opportunities of safe, secure, and trustworthy artificial intelligence systems for sustainable development,” and most recently, the September 2024 outcome document on the “Pact for the Future, Global Digital Compact and Declaration on Future Generations” from the first United Nations Summit of the Future, a meeting convened before the main high-level ministerial meeting of the General Assembly.

While these consensus documents recommend adopting a human rights approach to the design, development, and deployment of technologies, and emphasize the importance of inclusion and fairness regarding specific population groups, mention of the needs and support of older adults, older women, or aging populations in general is scarce. As one example, in the outcome documents from the Summit of the Future, “ageing populations” are mentioned just once in fifty-six pages of text—and not in reference to emerging technologies. This was manifestly evident at the Summit of the Future, where areas of focus included: (1) reforms to global governance and challenges associated with multilateralism in peace and security, (2) efforts to facilitate ideas of inclusive innovation to address the digital divide, and (3) goals to foster an efficient sustainable global system for both youth and future generations.

The omission of aging populations ignores shifts in population dynamics and neglects the enormous societal and economic contributions that can be harnessed if emerging technologies are designed to meet the needs of aging populations.

Unpacking the global megatrend

Across a range of development levels and geographic locations, societies around the world are seeing their populations getting older—a demographic shift often described as population aging. What was once a trend primarily found in highly developed economies is now—thanks to advances in twenty-first century scientific research, medical discovery, technological innovation, and development progress—true everywhere: average life expectancy has increased across the globe. Available data underscores just how rapid this demographic shift is. In 2020, the number of individuals aged sixty years and older outnumbered children younger than five for the first time in history. The World Health Organization projects that approximately 1.4 billion people will be aged at least sixty years old by the end of this decade.

The pace of demographic change, however, is uneven and largely driven by the Global South and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Specifically, a 2022 AARP and Economist Impact report (to which one of the authors contributed) reveals that, by 2050, the greatest rates of growth for adults age sixty-five years and older will be in LMICs, especially Sub-Saharan African nations. Meanwhile, Asian countries will contribute over 70 percent of the global increase in aging populations. Moreover, growth in this population segment is projected to be 2.5 times greater in LMICs than that experienced by high-income countries (HICs) that are already experiencing the societal and economic transformations brought forth by these shifts. Fortunately, in an effort to fully address and harness the benefits from aging populations, HICs are “mainstreaming aging” via the development and implementation of Action Plans on Aging, which serve as multi-year, whole-of-government roadmaps wherein aging is embedded into policies and programs across government. Importantly, as it relates to technology and its ubiquity in daily life, many of these nationwide plans—from Singapore’s Action Plan for Successful Ageing 2023 to New Zealand’s Better Later Life—recognize the importance of digital inclusion achieved via programs, policies, and services to improve the quality of life and social inclusion of older adults.

Accompanying these shifts to older populations is a well-documented range of implications for how society functions and operates. These include (1) recommendations on how cities can be reimagined to address the global megatrends of population aging and urbanization, (2) changes to the makeup and composition of the workforce, and (3) shifting family dynamics resulting in higher numbers of informal caregivers and individuals requiring care. Acknowledging and, in turn, harnessing these societal changes is vitally important in light of analyses revealing that the fifty-and-over population contributed close to 34 percent (or $45 trillion) of global gross domestic product in 2020.

The acceleration of these global demographic shifts is coming amid the rapid proliferation of emerging technologies such as generative AI, which have profound potential to support older adults. Possible benefits include boosting societal and economic participation and enhancing quality of life—if universal standards and principles ensure the inclusion of older adults’ needs in the design, development, and dissemination of these technologies.

Why these global instruments matter for aging populations

While these instruments devote little time to aging populations, closer inspection reveals that core principles around the use and dissemination of emerging technologies hold great promise for older adults, including:

• Inclusive design and accessibility: Due to varying levels of digital literacy, sensory abilities, and mobility, it is essential to ensure the design of emerging technologies accounts for the needs of older adults. It is crucial to consider and incorporate accessible interfaces, simplicity of controls, and personalized options that ensure the accommodation of individual preferences and limitations.
• Digital literacy initiatives and aging populations: Putting aging populations at the center of digital literacy initiatives will be necessary to bridge the gap between development of fast-paced AI technologies and their use by older people, especially in underserved areas.
• Data protection and security for older adults: Relatively lower levels of technological sophistication, paired with empirical evidence that older adults are at higher risk for scams and frauds, mean that emerging technologies must take extra care to ensure the security of aging populations. Protections and security features should be user-friendly and easily understood for a spectrum of users across both age and digital literacy.

Cementing the ethos of “trustworthy AI”

The global aging population will comprise an increasing share of the consumer base for emerging technologies in the decades ahead. Meeting their needs through inclusive design and other considerations should be viewed as a business imperative by those bringing these technologies to market.

At the same time, inclusion and accessibility—with clear benefits for groups that today are on the wrong side of the digital divide—can also help address skepticism around these advances, particularly in the realm of AI. Older adults are often overlooked and marginalized in society due to ageism, or through misperceptions about their level of technological sophistication. Technology-based efforts to curb this marginalization can show how incorporating principles of trustworthy AI can enhance social inclusion, advance human rights, and harness the potential of human capital across the course of life. This will help foster an equitable digital economy in line with AI global guidelines about justice and balance and should be an essential factor of sustainable AI integration.

Fixing policymakers’ blind spot

Despite broad awareness of the demographic shift leading to aging societies globally, recent global instruments on emerging technologies rarely, if at all, acknowledge older people, neglecting an important and growing segment of the population.

This is a glaring blind spot among policymakers given the current and future economic and societal contributions of older adults. It also overlooks the possibilities for enhancing those contributions with the implementation of responsible, inclusive, and ethical emerging technologies such as generative AI.

The global megatrend of population aging is happening in parallel with groundbreaking innovations that will change our societies and economies. It is vital that future global consensus documents on these emerging technologies include the perspectives and voices of older adults.

Vijeth Iyengar is a nonresident senior fellow with the ’s GeoTech Center. The views reflected in the article are the author’s views and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer.

Gunay Kazimzade is a PhD. researcher at Technical University of Berlin, a senior artificial intelligence consultant at Mercedes-Benz Consulting GmbH, and a member of the GeoTech Center’s AI Connect program in partnership with the US Department of State. The views reflected in the article are the author’s views and do not necessarily reflect the views of her employer.

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Vijeth Iyengar

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