Counting care workers: when the 'muddle' is the message

<p dir="ltr">There is power in numbers. Consequently counting is central to modern bureaucracies and when, how and about whom counting is done matters greatly for who gets what, under what conditions and when. Answering these ‘counting’ questions has taken on urgency as we proceed at pace to enable decision- making by Artificial Intelligence (AI), with ‘big’ data, large language models and algorithms problem-solving for us (see Chapters 4 and 14 to consider big data on ageing). Increasingly, data will power who and what are visible, while data silences will oppress who and what are not.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><p><br></p>