America, like many countries, is an aging population. This is resulting in a growing number of younger people in america taking on the role of unpaid family caregiver. According to a report put out by AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, the number of family caregivers has increased by 45% to a record 63 million Americans. The Caregiver Action Network has published statistics on the financial and emotional impact that the work has on caregivers. The numbers going forward aren’t enccouraging, as you might imagine. Within that population of 63 million American caregivers, I want to focus on a growing segment: adult caregivers to adults with dementia. The NIH has published projections that the financial (and emotional) burdens are set to double by 2060.
With this in mind, I want to write about my personal experience of being an administrative caregiver to a non-household aging releative at this early stage of this steep curve. I want to walk through the problems I encounter, the (enormous) hurdles I see for digital agents and solutions that I propose (which is really highlighting other people’s work that I believe needs more visibility).
Unseen Caregivers: Powers of Attorney
What little attention that is given to the caregiving crisis in America is, rightfully, mostly given to clinical, assisted living, or live-in or hands-on caregivers. That work is valuable and deserves more attention. However, I also want to highlight the unseen work of thousands of administrative caregivers, a term I’m using for those, like myself, who are handling the administrative affairs for those who cannot or can no longer manage their own – often having to do so remotely.
This work is unseen by most people, but other caregivers are aware of this work. Assisted living professionals are often fielding calls from exasperated family members trying to piece together financial information over the phone. In addition to calling and emailing, they are often taking trips so to find information so they can file taxes or renew public services. This work is time intensive and thankless. It is a legitimate burden in America, especially if you already have a full-time job and/or are already a caregiver or a parent.
And it is even harder since there are few legal frameworks to standardize your experpience and expectations. The lack of these legal frameworks often mean there is no single way to authorize yourself as a financial Power of Attorney across different types of organizations across different states. As a result, being a legal power of attorney for someone in America often feels like an extralegal and quasi-criminal process.
I have been doing this work for a relative since 2012. It is now 2025 and in all that time, I have been hoping that legal and technical solutions would emerge and they just haven’t. It’s basically just as bad as when I started doing this.
It’s this personal experience that I draw from when I personally laugh at the idea that Agentic AI is ready to go out on the open web and do anything substantial on anyone’s behalf. Rather than just criticize, I propose we revisit a previous technology before we talk about building Trustworthy digital agents (Generative AI-based or not). Specifically we should be collectively revisiting Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of the semantic web to support authoritative information retrieval infrastructure to enable trustworthy decision-making for digital agents.
Thankfully, I’m not the only one who’s had this idea. Projects like the Linked Open Data Cloud and The Proto Open-Knowledge-Network have been working on this issue and have created demonstrable case studies across legal, medical, and academic domains for years and decades. I believe this work, specifically in the context of developing Trustworthy AI, deserves more public attention.
This is a lengthy topic that requires deep exploration to flesh out. I don’t know how many posts there will be total, but the next topics I want to cover include:
- A walkthrough of how human agents currently navigate the web (and the world) for other people – and what would be required for a digital agent to be able to do so
- The Semantic Web infrastructure – the afformentioned teams who are already building it, and how this could be useful for agents
- How Semantic infrastructure should be governed to align with legal frameworks
- Why we need to revisit the legal frameworks for human agents before we set the framework for digital agents
I hope other people find my exploration of this topic to be helpful. If so, thank you for reading. Feedback is always appreciated. See you soon.