ABSTRACT
Developments in technology have spawned a variety of new tropes within the social sciences. One of the most significant of these is that of a digitalised or networked society where social relations are embedded within and mediated by new forms of communication and materialities. This technological turn has captured the interests of gerontologists, students of Age Studies and Science and Technology Studies, highlighting the potential of adaptive technologies to render later life less onerous and the potential risks related to a diminishment of human care. This chapter surveys this new landscape of ageing, mapping out key tensions related to a range of technologies as these comprise new forms of what we term ‘humachine-age-assemblages’. We argue that an evident duality between utopian and dystopian futures corresponds to a distinction between an agentic ‘third age’ and an un-agentic ‘fourth age’. While the former suggests the importance of active consumption to make later life more pleasurable, the latter shifts the emphasis to assistive technologies that reflect assumptions of dependency, impairment and loss of agency. The imagined futures of much gerontechnology, we argue, are largely based on this fear of the spectre of the fourth age that risk only darkening its shadow.
