Aging Out

Tomorrow I leave the rolls of Americans in the prime working years.

In practical terms, this won't mean very much. I have a job, and I have no intent to leave it, so I will go to work and continue on as I have for a few years.I hope to make some adjustment in how I present material in the classes I teach, but the content will not change much if at all, and my schedule changes on a couple of days, but on one of those, I just get fifteen extra minutes of break between classes.

Still, it means I'm getting older. If something happens where I work, and I find myself no longer in the same job, I suppose the statics would suggest I might have a harder time finding acceptable employment now. I don't know if the general division by age should really include professionals, but they do, at least for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. My intention is not to find out.

This is not the only sign that I am getting older. I have two grandsons. My hair is gray. I went horse back riding almost a week ago, and I'm still stiff and sore from the experience.

One advantage algorithms have over us organic beings is that their physical nature doesn't necessarily decay with time. There is, at least currently, some physical object that contains them, but algorithms can spread from object to object, gaining access to more data and becoming more powerful over time. That clearly isn't happening to me.

Of course, if I were to become unemployed, I would have more time to dedicate to seeking out and mocking the algorithms. Let that be noted.