| Sumario: | Participants T. Kolling (Germany), M. Damholdt (Denmark), M. Wessel (Germany), S. Baisch (Germany). ISSUE Embodied and non-embodied AI become increasingly well-known in both younger and older age groups. In the context of gerontechnology, older people are usually assumed the primary users of (new) technology, whereas younger people are considered either secondary users, like, e.g., formal caregivers, or robot developers. Since believes and attitudes are powerful determinants of behavior, they affect the success or failure of a technology by impacting on both technology development, i.e., through developer perceptions, and robot implementation, i.e., through perceptions of primary and secondary users. In all of these relevant groups, believes and attitudes can be affective, cognitive, or behavioral, they can be stereotypical, and they can relate not only to a particular technology, but also to its users. Although most technology acceptance models acknowledge the importance of attitudes for robot acceptance and usage, the multitude of different facets of this complex construct is still not well understood. CONTENT The current symposium therefore examines (1) age- and gender-related differences in attitudes towards AI, as opposed (2) age- and gender-stereotypical views on the users, (3) cognitive and affective attitudes towards emotional and non-emotional technology as well as (4) perspectives of three different stakeholder groups. STRUCTURE In detail, the first two talks examine attitudes towards technology. Kolling firstly presents an age- and gender-related framework of technology diffusion and data on age differences in cognitive and affective attitudes towards AI. Thereafter, Damholdt examines how different individual characteristics affect older and younger users' attitudes towards (emotional) robots. In contrast, the following two talks examine attitudes towards technology users. Baisch compares the age-related perceptions of (younger) professional caregivers and elderly people on the older users of two different companion type robots. Finally, Wessel presents results from a qualitative approach investigating the age- and gender-stereotypical views of younger stakeholders (robot developers and professional caregivers) on older robot users and discusses the ethical implications of the findings. CONCLUSION The different talks show the multiple facets that need to be considered in research on attitudes towards technology. They suggest that stakeholders in robot development and implementation differ in their attitudes towards both new technologies and their users. They also highlight that these groups are rarely aware of this. As will be shown, sensitivity to these issues is mandatory, since ignorance can hamper robot development and implementation, and, even more important, has ethical implications for the older users.
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