Jan 22, 2025
Intro: You are listening to Foreseeable, a production of Global-is-Asian, the flagship thought leadership digital platform of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Each episode we invite an expert for a conversation relating to their field of study or experience and to find out what they foresee happening in the future.
As lifespans increase, it's projected that 2.1 billion people will be aged 65 and above by 2050. That's one reason why it's so important to address the negativity surrounding ageing, as positive perceptions of ageing can lead to longer and healthier lives. Dr Reuben Ng is an Assistant Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and a behavioural scientist who also spent 16 years in government consulting and research. He's an expert in ageism, social gerontology, and quantitative social science. It's in that context that we spoke to him about the ongoing longevity revolution and how our AI and agency are helping to reframe ageing in a positive light. Thank you for joining us. Could you start by just telling us how you describe the longevity revolution?
Reuben Ng: Thank you so much for having me, David. Maybe let me paint the picture of what the world will be in 2050. In 2050, there'll be 2.1 billion older adults, 65 years and above. If you think about 2.1 billion older adults, it's actually the whole population of China and US combined and more. But countries are just not prepared for that. We are thinking about a lot of existential issues like climate change, scams, but people haven't really thought about what would happen when you have so many older adults.
Countries are pretty much sleepwalking through this demographic transition. Every time people talk about ageing, it's always so negative. It's always about burden, it's always about disease. It's always about caregiving. So I think there is a need to think about this in a more serious manner.
Reuben Ng: I think it is important to celebrate ageing because never in history have we had people living so long. Somebody born today is expected to live a 100-year life. So I think it is a real revolution when it comes to demographics.
The reason why we label as a longevity revolution is because we want to call to attention this great achievement by humankind. The fact that we can live 100-year lives now, and to frame ageing in a more positive manner. So that's how we came to this term, longevity revolution.
David: Now given all that context that you just explained, what spurred you to study AI and creativity and the way that seniors are using it to express themselves? On TikTok, for example.
Reuben Ng: So earlier on I used to do a lot of studies and we were surprised to find that people who think negatively about ageing live eight years shorter than those who think positively about ageing, right?
Which means that there's actually a sort of, almost a deficit if you think negatively. So there's a link between sort of psychology and biology and longevity if you like, and we also found later that people who think negatively about ageing tend to have a higher risk of heart diseases. They tend to have hearing loss earlier in their life.
So where did this negativity come from? Aren't we always positive about older adults? Aren't we celebrating sort of an ageing society and all the adults, our parents and grandparents?
I started looking as far back as possible. So we look at Gallup and Pew, but they only have survey data for the last 40-50 years, certainly not 100-200 years, right? So I started talking with linguists and to my amazement, linguists actually have been compiling all these data sets for long periods of time in the last 100-200 years, but only to study grammatical and synthetical change over time.
Reuben Ng: That's where I started getting really interested in how can we use this treasure trove of data and develop AI techniques to look at societal perceptions of older adults over the last 100, 200 years. That's how we came about using AI and age stereotypes.
We compiled this big data set of 1.5 billion words across four different genres; magazines, newspapers, fiction, nonfiction books. It was from 1810 all the way to 2020. We found that actually from 1810 to 1880, people were very positive about ageing. They were, describing older adults as romantics, as heroes.
1880, it became neutral, and from 1880 all the way to 2020, it was just heartbreakingly negative.
What was driving the negativity behind it in the last 40, 50 years? I call this the medicalisation of ageing. So every time when people talk about older adults, it's always about illnesses and treatments.
That's great because it's public education, but my point to journalists is, it's perfectly fine to talk about Alzheimer's, dementia. But every time you talk about this, please highlight a positive example. So you balance out the negative and positive stereotypes because if you do, then people hopefully will ingest more of these positive stereotypes, and it leads to a healthier life.
David: Okay, so that is a, maybe an unintended consequence of the medicalisation of ageing and just trying to get out the information about healthcare. But what about the active role of art and artificial intelligence, and using that to change people's perceptions? What has your research taught you about it as a way to reframe ageing?
Reuben Ng: That brings to mind some of our newer work when it comes to social media, like TikTok. We found actually in news media that there are a lot more negative stereotypes about older adults compared to positive ones.
In fact, the ratio is 6:1. So for every positive word you use to describe older adults in news media, there's six negative ones. And it's just heartbreaking. We always describe them as disabled and they cannot walk, and so I started thinking about: what can we do about it?
Can we reframe the way we talk about older adults? So that's where we started using AI to look at reframing of how we refer to older adults. So, one of the research papers showed that if we refer to them and foreground their age, so we refer to them as older adults, senior citizens, we foreground their age, right?
Reuben Ng: Versus if we foreground their roles, we refer to them as grandparents, refer to them based on their professional careers, their work, it actually attracted a lot more positive narratives compared to if you foreground them based on their age.
So we came up with this concept called role-based framing. Hopefully it celebrates the contribution of older adults, rather than just focusing on negative sentiments because of their age. And then we next thought how is it that we could perpetuate more positive narratives? We realised that when we think about decreasing negative age stereotypes or ageism, we are always thinking of it from an organisational perspective.
How can the media do something to decrease it? How can journalists balance the stereotypes? Unfortunately, we have forgotten that older adults have agency and they could do something about it.
That's where I started investigating TikTok because in, in TikTok in the social media space, there are these older influencers. We call them grand-fluencers.
And they're out there defying age stereotypes, you know? Letting people know the reality of ageing. It's not just what people think it is, but it's something to be celebrated. So that's the reason why we use AI to think about what we can do about it so that we are not stuck in, okay, there's all this negative stereotyping: 6:1, 75% of people think negative about older adults, but what we need to do is just to reframe it. And get older adults to own it, and talk about the positive aspects of ageing.
David: Okay. And those that are already doing it, the grand-fluencers on TikTok, what have you seen about the content that they produce, compared to like traditional portrayals that we've seen in mainstream media? How does that compare to what the seniors themselves are doing with agency?
Reuben Ng: So I think the mainstream media, when they talk about ageing in general, it's pretty much still about illnesses and treatment.
The medicalisation doesn't really focus a lot on the human aspects of ageing. Yes, there's some decline, but there are also some upsides. So it's great that some of these older adults are actually talking about some of these upsides. They're talking about enjoying their lives with their grandchildren and so on. So I think it focuses on the reality of the experience rather than defining older adults simply based on their medical conditions.
David: What about like busting stereotypes or things like that? How have you seen that play out?
Reuben Ng: It's quite remarkable. Some of these older adults that we study on social media, they're doing like, you know, dance moves. They're actually taking some of these negative stereo types that they have, for example, if they're slow, and putting a positive spin towards it.
They are showing how they could become better even compared to young people. I've seen some of these older adults, they have partnered organisations like, uh, ARP in the US: American Association of Retired Professionals. To sort of portray ageing as it is, rather than to perpetuate some of these negative stereotypes.
David: And what about, I've heard that some of them, are kind of making light of it, poking fun a little bit, using humour to dispel the myths. Can you share anything about that?
Reuben Ng: Most of the negative stereotypes that we have found are about physical attributes. And the positive stereotypes typically are about behavioural attributes to say that they're wise and so on. So what they're trying to do is to say that, look, I'm not weak. I'm 70, I'm 75, but I'm still able to do all these kinds of stuff.
I think in terms of this busting stereotypes, It's all about mindset. Even though, uh, I may have a disability, there are things I can still outdo a lot of, young people.
David: And what about the trend of calling out ageism when, when it's presented? I know that it has appeared on social media and, you know, there's a lot of calling out on social media, but what about the trend of targeting ageism when it appears?
Reuben Ng: I think ageism appears at many levels. I've seen a lot of national surveys that look at five-year age brackets. when we want to collect data. So for example, 15 to 19, 20 to 24, and for some reason, after 65, is 65 years and above.
So you're assuming somebody who's 88 has the same needs and profiles as somebody who's 68, which cannot be the case. So that is, I think, unintentional ageism on one level. It's not because of ill intention, but a lack of awareness. So I think these are ageism that sometimes manifests itself in policy making data collection.
I'll give another example. Um. We know that the ageing market is booming, right? A lot of tech companies are trying to think about, are there different products, tech solutions for older adults? But if you look at the tech team designing for older adults, they're all filled with young people.
Reuben Ng: How can they design the stuff that older people need when you don't even get the views of older people? We need to be very inclusive in some things that we do.
There's also another saying that sometimes, AI algorithms are biased. AI stuff that we do are biased. And the reason why it's biased because the teams are not diverse. So I think increasingly we need to think of diverse teams in age, ethnicity, background, experience, and so on, to make sure that the algorithms and things that we design are reflective of the complexities of society.
David: Is there anything else that can be done to prevent bias in AI beyond just being inclusive, like on the teams working on that? Or is there anything else as far as the development, the deployment, and the ethics when it applies to age representation?
Reuben Ng: I think when it comes to age representation, we need to think about something that's purposeful and age appropriate. Right now in the AI space, there are just a lot of AI algorithms. It's progressed so quickly, right? You have generative AI in the form of chat GPT, and things like that. They're going to version four, version five.
By the end of the day, there are a lot of AI algorithms now looking for use cases. Meaning specific applications, right? Ultimately, let's say if I were to, look for a certain type of cancer or I were to look for certain kind of stuff, I can't just plonk in the AI algorithms to look for it, right? I need to be able to say, these are examples like this, and therefore use these examples to look for it.
That gap is missing. So I think when it comes to an ageing society, I mentioned that sometimes national surveys put 65 years and above. I think it's important to understand that there are further age categories beyond age 65, for example, "youngest old", which is maybe, 66 to 74, and there's "mid old" and "oldest old" is 75 years and above.
Reuben Ng: I think only then will the AI revolution be augmentative on the longevity revolution.
David: Okay. So even just something simple like making sure that your classifications include the different age ranges can make a difference on the AI application. And the way that it's may or may not have a bias in the way it's applied. Okay.
Reuben Ng: That'll be a good start.
David: Is there anything older people can do to help influence AI and the application and the use of it?
Reuben Ng: There are a lot of things that older adults can do. I remember doing a project on increasing older adults adoption of mobile banking and internet banking.
Sometimes from a government perspective, we are always thinking, what can we do? What can banks do to promote that? But in a national study that we did on mobile banking and i-Banking adoption, we actually found that there are two distinct groups of older adults.
One group of older adults are what we call technophobic. They don't want to use it. But there's actually another group that loves technology, we call them technophilic. So it's not just thinking about what central bankers can do, what governments can do to have a campaign. We could also think about cross activation of the different segments, meaning, that the older adults themselves who love technology, could actually persuade the older adults, same age who don't like technology.
We call that the cross activation of the different behavioural segments. I think increasingly we want to think about that to create a more inclusive society and ground activation; bottom up rather than always thinking about top down.
David: Speaking of that kind of bottom up mentality, what about people who are the young generation now and maybe even future generations? What should we be doing or what can be done to make sure that from the bottom up, they're able to address or avoid ageism?
Reuben Ng: So something interesting that we are seeing, you, you may have heard, that Singapore is a high trust society, right? So we got through COVID-19 relatively well because of our high trust in government. But there's actually a downside to that, uh, is that we are very susceptible towards scams.
So, the easiest way to scam somebody in Singapore is to impersonate a government official. It seemed to work better than countries who have no trust in the government.
Reuben Ng: So we did a another survey study and we found that actually there were two groups that were more susceptible. Uh, two age groups that were more susceptible towards scams in Singapore. One, younger people, and the other one, that's older people. This is what the survey shows, but when we actually drilled down, what was happening was just quite intriguing for me, because we found that older adults typically, they're scammed, right?
But who is getting scammed on their behalf? So for example, they want to be on mobile banking and internet banking. They will ask their grandchildren to download this for them. So it's actually their grandkids, being scammed on their grandparents' behalf.
So I think most of our scam interventions are focused typically on young people, older people. What some of our studies show is that the intervention needs to bring together the grandchild and grandparent pair. I think increasingly, if we bring grandchildren and grandparents together, there's more intergenerational bonding, the age groups get to know each other better. It decreases ageism and age stereotypes, and actually, ageing is something to be celebrated instead of something that is of a burden.
David: Now speaking about Singapore specifically and looking ahead because you said this longevity revolution. You were saying looking at the year 2050, the point where there'll be 2 billion people aged, what? 60 and over?
Reuben Ng: Yeah.
David: Okay. But between now and 2050, what do you foresee happening in Singapore as the population ages and there's a longevity revolution here?
Reuben Ng: So you may have seen recently on Netflix that Singapore has now been designated as a blue zone.
So when that came out, there are a lot of people celebrating it. There are a lot of people thinking, really, is this really the case? So I think some of us have to view that from 30,000 feet perspective, it is a blue zone.
But if you go down 5,000 feet, there are actually different shades of blue. There are different older adults with different types of experiences. It doesn't mean that since Singapore is a blue zone; great, we celebrate it, we tell other countries what we are doing.
But actually there are different shades of blue! There are other places, with older adults, that are doing better than some other regions in Singapore. I think it's important to, first of all, acknowledge and understand that and think about what we can do, uh, to, to help them as much as possible.
Now the ageing population in Singapore is very heterogeneous. We have people, who are illiterate. They can't read and write. So one of the things that, uh, one of the big issues in Singapore is the incidents of falls; people are falling down, breaking big bones.
There's a statistic showing that almost 60% of older adults 65 years and above, they go to an emergency department in a hospital because of a serious fall. This is a big heartbreaking issue. So, a part of my research is to think about how can we increase fall awareness among older adults?
And we realise that these fall campaigns are sort of English and Mandarin. I think the messages should go in, all kinds of language from Tamil to Teochew. Or even in Tagalog and Bahasa to get, uh, the domestic helpers who are caring for these older adults to bring them in. I think that's the first thing.
And secondly, when you think of the caregiving landscape in Singapore, these campaigns just speak directly to older adults, not to the people caring for them. So, we started coming up with TikTok campaigns to convince grandkids to bring their grandparents for some of these fall prevention programmes.
So, I think increasingly from a longevity revolution perspective, we understand that there would be some disparities. It may benefit some, but not really benefit others. I think that, point here I'm making, is we really need to drill down to try to find different strokes for different folks.
David: So it really is about the details, looking at those different shades, and making sure that there's support and information for everyone depending on where they are. Lastly, I wanted to ask you, how has this research shaped your own personal views about ageing?
Reuben Ng: That's a great question. I first got into this research because I see in the two family members that I love, two very different ageing experiences. My grandmother who died many years ago in her eighties was so positive about ageing. She was just full of joy when it comes to ageing, and you could see how the positive perceptions shaped her life.
My dad, on the other hand, he died when he was 71, back in 2020. He was actually very negative for ageing. You could see that, how that took a toll on him. So that's where I realised that, ageing perceptions are important. We talk about supplements that we can eat, but it's so important to think about a mindset shift. Because the mindset shift can lead to a lot of benefits later on.
We found that people with positive mindsets tend to feel purposeful about life. They take their medications, they tend to exercise more. They want to be healthy for as long as possible.
The other thing that I've done in this ageing research has shaped my own thinking is how art can be used in longevity revolution of ageing. For the longest time as an academic and as a data scientist, I've been thinking how best to communicate policy, how best to communicate data science.
We typically use slides to talk about stuff nobody really understands, nobody really cares. But artists on the other hand, people get so excited, right? If there's piece of art everyone can touch and feel. So that's where we began a very happy collaboration with artists.
So the other project looked at health risk in particular. So we found that in the earlier years when it come to health, when it came to health risk, uh, the word neck occurred very often with the word risk. And why neck? Because people are falling off their horses, breaking their necks.
These days with cast, nobody really break necks anymore for the last 50, 60 years. Health risk, like cancer, heart disease, is actually the most prevalent topic. So after we did that, so we, displayed that big artwork and we wanted to use that to communicate to the public. So, after a while, so it was actually placed beside a security guard post.
And after a while, guess who was the docent of the artwork? It was actually the security guard. And he didn't know that we created the artwork. So I went incognito to him, I said, "Encik" - honorific for Mr. - "Could you explain this to me?" There was a poster on the side of the artwork telling about the data science that we did.
And he was able to explain 80% of it right! What was more amazing was he was able to weave in his personal stories. He said, "Couple of years ago, I got a heart attack, you know, you need to watch your diet", and things like that. It almost moved me to tears. I just didn't expect that [and] that was what the intention was - to use art publicly, communicate some of these policies and campaigns. And then I reflected and thought about why did art work? I think it worked because it goes through two different routes of persuasion.
The first root is actually the cognitive root of persuasion, right? We are speaking to the mind, but when it comes to art, it also goes through the emotional root of persuasion, affective or emotional root. So you don't just speak to the mind, it speaks to the heart.
So I think just to round it off, for an ageing experience to be as nourishing as possible, we cannot just keep the mind active. We also need to focus on the heart. And the way we focus on the heart is to make sure we actively engage with society. We actively engage across different generations and together, I think we can really spur and accelerate the longevity revolution.
David: That's wonderful. Thank you so much; you've given me a lot to think about, especially about my mindset, but it's also nice to hear that there's a room and role for art and artists to, to play a part in this as well.
Reuben Ng: For sure.
David: So thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
Reuben Ng: Thank you so much, David.