The video clock was never about ability

My grandparents got the younger ones in to set the clock on the video recorder. It wasn’t hard. The instructions were in the box, and they were perfectly capable of following them. They’d decided it wasn’t theirs to learn, and because not learning it cost nothing (someone else set the clock, the film still recorded), nobody ever tested that decision.

I’d always assumed the thing behind it was fear. The research says it’s closer to a belief, absorbed so early that it doesn’t feel like one.

Absorbed early, about you later

Becca Levy at Yale calls it stereotype embodiment. You pick up the stereotypes about old people as a child, they’re reinforced for decades, and then one day they’re about you, working away without you noticing. Her Baltimore study is the one that stopped me. It followed 395 people for up to 38 years, and those who held more negative views of ageing showed 30.2 per cent greater decline on a memory test after 60 than those who held fewer. The belief isn’t an excuse for the decline. It’s part of the mechanism.

Fig. 1 · Belief shapes the decline

There’s a lab version too, called age-based stereotype threat: remind someone of the “can’t do technology” idea and they ask for help more and try less. I’d treat that as a likely mechanism rather than settled science. One small study of 36 older adults learning new apps didn’t test the stereotype at all, but it did find that those who rated their own tech ability lowest asked for help the most.

Slower, not incapable

I’m not going to claim nothing changes. Processing speed and the ability to hold new things in mind do fall off with age, while what you know, your vocabulary and your judgement hold up or improve. Harada and colleagues set it out well, and one study of nearly 50,000 people found that some abilities, vocabulary among them, don’t peak until your 40s or much later.

Rachel Wu’s group at UC Riverside tested what happens when older people learn several new things at once. Adults aged 58 to 86 took three classes together for three months, from a list that included Spanish, the iPad, photography and composing music. By six weeks their working memory and cognitive control had risen to about the level of a separate group of middle-aged adults (the paper, reissued in 2023 after a small analysis error; the findings held), and a year later the gains were still there. It’s small: 33 people took the classes across the two studies, and the only control group, nine people, improved a little too. So it’s a hint rather than proof. But it points the same way as Levy: learning keeps the mind growing all the way through life, not just at the start.

The young aren’t magic either

The “digital native”, a term Marc Prensky coined in 2001, is a myth. Kirschner and De Bruyckere’s review put it plainly: there is no such thing as a digital native who is information-skilled simply because (s)he has never known a world that was not digital. What the young have is time and a social reason to be on the platform of the moment: their friends are there, and it’s where status is won. The products are aimed at them too. Social media was built for the age when you’re hunting status. That’s targeting, not talent, and the energy a new tool brings benefits everyone.

Not frightened, not interested

I expected the numbers to show older people frightened of AI. They don’t. In the UK, Ofcom found 54 per cent of adults say they use AI tools like ChatGPT, falling from 79 per cent of 16 to 24s to 29 per cent of 65 to 74s and 12 per cent of the over-75s.

The Pew Research Center asked Americans who never use chatbots why not. The top reason by a distance was that they weren’t interested, a major reason for 60 per cent, ahead of privacy and doubts about accuracy. The nearest thing to fear on the list, not knowing how to use them, was a major reason for 29 per cent.

Fig. 2 · Who never uses a chatbot, and why

That makes it harder, not easier. You can argue with fear. Some of that 60 per cent will have weighed it up and said no, and that’s a fair answer. The survey can’t tell them apart from my grandparents, who never weighed up the video clock at all. I suspect plenty are the second kind, because “not interested” is what “not mine to learn” sounds like from the inside.

A clock that compounds

Delegating the video clock cost nothing. Delegating AI compounds. Every month you don’t use it, the people who do are getting faster and more capable at the ordinary business of life, and the gap isn’t closing on its own. Online banking and smartphone apps had a running cost too, for anyone who left them to the kids. But I think this is the most significant of them, and it has got to the point where what you gain is worth the effort of learning it. I’d also bet the divide between people who use it and people who don’t will be bigger than the one between people who used the internet and people who didn’t, because the internet gave you information and this gives you capacity.

Everywhere, to find the edges

My approach was to put AI into every corner of my personal life. Not to run my life by it, but to find out where it fits and where it doesn’t.

The records are the best example. I got into classical music, bought a new turntable, and the charity shops near me happened to be full of good donations. I didn’t want to spend my evenings researching labels and pressings while the bargains walked out of the door. So I photographed the sleeves and let the AI tell me what I was looking at, which labels and pressings were worth having, and whether I already owned it. The collection lives in a plain Google Sheet that I talk to through Claude: no database, no app, no code. It stopped me buying doubles.

Yes, the man who wrote Turn Down the Tap, a book about slowing down what comes in, used AI to collect records faster. Fair. Researching them by hand would have been fun too. I chose speed because the bargains were there now. They were probably house clearances, in excellent condition and hard to come by, and there was only ever one copy, so anyone could have walked in and bought it. A shop might have 50 or 60 worth a look, and checking each one against a spreadsheet by hand would have been mentally taxing. Doing it all by hand could have taken years.

The learning didn’t get skipped. It got moved. Once the records were home, I started asking the AI for a composer of the day, and then for the eras of classical music.

Some places it didn’t fit. I had it build me a gym timetable and a meal plan that changed on the days I was cycling. It was very good, but it lived on a page I had to go and find, and it didn’t know what was in the fridge, so it became more bother than it saved and I went back to doing it myself. And when I want to look something up from a photo, it’s often quicker to hold my finger on the text, let the phone pick it out, and search for it. That’s the point of the exercise. You only find the edges by going everywhere.

Fig. 3 · The loop, and the way out

The light switch still works

The objection I hear most is that going down this path will leave me helpless without it. It won’t. I take the tent and the bike and go where there’s no signal and no electricity for the lights, enjoy the outdoors, and come back to the tools afterwards. When I’m in a house with no smart home, I can still work the light switch, the heating and the oven. Learning a tool doesn’t unlearn the manual way.

Nobody sets the timetable after 21

School sets your curriculum until you’re about 21, and then nobody does. The figures suggest a lot of us stop learning when the timetable stops, often without noticing the handover. The Learning and Work Institute found 42 per cent of UK adults had done some learning in the past three years, falling to 18 per cent of 65 to 74s. Plenty don’t stop, mind: u3a has over 435,000 active members.

This is the thing I believe most strongly. Once your education ends, you’re in charge of it, and we’ve never had more to learn from. YouTube on its own would have been a miracle to my grandparents. Add the communities and the courses, and now an AI that will teach you anything at your own pace and never sigh at you. We get to pick the topics now. We set the curriculum.

The video clock was never about ability, and it still isn’t.