It's too late to feel old

At a lunch meeting recently, I introduced myself to some new people. I mentioned that I used to work with a mutual friend when we were at DEC 20 years ago.

"What did they do?" asked one twenty-something web-developer type.

"They were a big deal," said another of the attendees, a gray-beard like me. "They made minicomputers. Most of the original UNIX development was done on DEC systems."

"They were, at their peak," I said, "the second-largest computer company after IBM." Hoping to bring a bit more geekiness to the discussion, I added, "They had 36-bit systems."

"Cool," said the young guy. Not as in admiration, but in the same way that I listened to my father talk about converting a Model A car into a small tractor.

I wasn't trying to impress anyone with where I'd worked. I was just stating facts. My street cred wasn't established until much later, when I mentioned that my grandkids call me when they need help with their computers.

Things and people and ideas go from urgent to irrelevant in the simple slip of time.  This is the way that the old become invisible.

Notes on the future of work

This morning, we learn from Kevin Kelly in Why can't a machine do this?

If there is pressure to increase the productivity of human workers, the serious question to ask is, why can't a machine do this? The fact that a task is routine enough to be measured suggests that it is routine enough to go to the robots. In my opinion, many of the jobs that are being fought over by unions today are jobs that will be outlawed within several generations as inhumane. (His emphasis)

Of course, robots in the workplace aren't new. We're seeing a lot of robot news stories. Increasingly, those stories are written by robots. (The stories are written by computer programs, which are not literally robots. See the next paragraph.) A Chicago company is using algorithms to write news stories, starting with the sports. It pretty much works, right up to and including the expected cliches. Read more (written by an alleged human) at Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?.

Robots are also reading and grading school papers. According to Michael Weinerip, in his NYT piece, Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously, these robotic reviews aren't very good at picking up grammatically correct, but factually flawed sentences. Then again, neither is the typical George Will reader.

And, then, well, er, um, here's this news: Researchers Claim Sex Robots Will Be Future Of Sex Tourism. The researchers are Australian, but the CBS affiliate in Las Vegas picked up the story. Dennis Hof, owner of the Bunny Ranch, doesn't think that robots will put his employees out of business. He told the TV station,, that a man mostly wants attention from a woman. "He wants to tell her stories, wants her to listen, wants her to act like she cares – a robot’s not going to do that.”

Meanwhile, over on Shiny Shiny, we learn that Panasonic wants to replace your hairdresser with a robot:



This seems like a good time to be nearer the end of a career than the beginning. It'll be good to get away from the increasingly robotic world and onto a retirement filled with hobbies and friends and memories and, oh, snap.


GeckoSystems CareBot™ helps to alleviate caregiver shortage for Japanese elderly.

Seeing ourselves in another's mirror

The occasion was the passing of my mother's cousin at age 94. He was my mother's father's sister's son. For most of the gathered, including Bill's four daughters, I'd not seen these folks for five to as much as 50 years.
I might not be thinking of myself as old. If, however, I haven't seen someone for 50 years, well, if it ain't old, it'll do until some other explanation comes along.
"We went straight from being children to being old," remarked one of my second cousins. "We skipped right over that growing-up part and becoming adults."
You have to let your vision relax a bit before you start to notice the family threads run through each of the faces. Listening, you hear the slight chop of a Finnish accent, even among the American-born. We swap memories of visits to this family's house, that family's farm, to the camp and sauna.
I have a scanned copy of a newspaper clipping of one girl who'd shot a deer. It was from the front page of the Gardner News. She called it her 15 minutes of fame. That was back in the 1950s. She lived a full and a good life, but that's what got her name and picture in the paper.


We jump past the old stuff and earnestly talk for a couple of hours about what's going on in our lives now. We learn of each other's talents, hopes, troubles, and fears and theirs sound like our own.
One has recently been sort of diagnosed as having MS, although it's not certain. "I think MS means 'Maybe Something.',"  There are stories of Alzheimer's, ALS, and  other afflictions. There are celebrations of good things in our lives, children and grandchildren, work and retirement, travel, and other fun stuff. The darker, awkward stories of divorce, depression, abortion, drug use, chronic unemployment, even those quickly get into the conversation because, well, frankly, because we don't have time to do otherwise. This is who we are, who we've become, and we need to know these things.
And then, just like that, the room was emptying. We promise that we'll stay in touch by email, Facebook, a phone call, a visit. (Several of the folks live right nearby.) We might even follow through on those promises. You know, though, how life gets full. A day becomes a week becomes a month becomes, well, you know.
We squeeze a half century of news into a couple of hours. Who are these people? How can I know them so well when, just a short while ago, we were introducing ourselves as though we were strangers?

Success by inexperience

Recently, I had a conversation with a hiring manager who had posted a job opening that sought junior people (less than five years of experience) for a particular assignment.
As we discussed the work, he said, "It's not about the pay rate. We're ok for funding. It's about the culture of a startup." He went on to describe not just the frenetic pace of the work, but, more particularly, the lack of structure in communications and decision-making. People who knew things were doing things and generally didn't have the cycles to sit down and write formal specifications. Those same smart and busy people often communicated irregularly, not necessarily because they were social misfits, but because they were just too damn busy.
More experienced workers, this manager had discovered, may have had the More junior people didn't have the backdrop of well-balanced workdays and figured that this craziness was and is normal. They didn't know any better and so could adapt better.
This manager was a gray-beard like yours truly. His comments weren't directed at people of a certain age, although the correlation between experience and age is hard to miss. No, it's about temperament.
We get old not when we lose energy or have aches or our stories trail off with lost characters fighting forgotten battles. No, that's not when we get old. We get old when we stop being able to see the world as it is and as it's becoming.
In part, then, age bias is less about not being able to do the work and more about the stereotype that we're not willing.

via Prejudices: third series, Volume 3 By Henry Louis Mencken