Ageism

Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination against people based on their age, most commonly directed at older adults. Ageism manifests at individual, institutional, and societal levels through assumptions about cognitive decline, technology incompetence, resistance to change, and reduced productivity. In technology contexts, ageism appears in AI systems that associate older adults with negative traits, in interface designs that assume declining abilities, and in hiring algorithms that favor younger candidates. Research has shown that large language models encode ageist stereotypes in their training data, producing outputs that portray older adults as technologically inept, forgetful, and dependent. The World Health Organization recognizes ageism as a widespread form of discrimination with significant impacts on health, well-being, and human rights.