Labor-saving technologies tend to result in home systems that are far more efficient overall, but not necessarily easier for the people doing the work. As historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan wrote in 1983’s “More Work for Mothers: The Ironies of Home Technology from the Open Stove to the Microwave,” innovations like the modern stove, the washer-dryer, and the vacuum cleaner simplified tasks that had previously been shared among multiple family members or outsourced to paid helpers and instead placed them in the hands of a single unpaid worker. Consumer technology enabled the 20th-century housewife to prepare meals and do laundry alone, but also raised the bar for how elaborate her dinners could be and how often she was expected to change the sheets.
This paradox of household technology found a counterpart in the millennium with the advent of email, the personal digital assistant, and the smartphone, which added welcome flexibility to the lives of working parents but also increased bosses’ expectations of their employees’ availability and productivity. In the 1920s, the mobile app market began to focus heavily on sports and school activities for children. Family logistics, once easily managed through printouts and PDFs, have become the origin of dozens of atomized apps—and unlike printouts and PDFs, many of these apps require you to watch ads and get your bank’s routing information. Until AI family assistants can take over the whac-a-mole duties in countless proprietary apps, many parents may hesitate about the wisdom of solving too much technology with more technology.
Daminger, the mother of a toddler, told me that parents who use AI need to think about both the limits of what the technology can do and the limits they want to set on how deeply AI penetrates their lives. She recently tried to train Claude to help meal plan for her family of three, but gave up after a few months. “It would leave out key ingredients, the proportions would be completely wrong and it would suggest the same five things over and over again,” she said. Maybe it would have done a better job, Daminger continued, if she had added more technology — if she had had a smart pantry and smart refrigerator that Claude could look into — or if she had done more to keep Claude informed about her child’s “ever-changing food preferences.” On the other hand, these private structures of family life, she said, are “something I don’t necessarily want to convey to AI.”
Katherine Goldstein, a friend of mine, author, and mother of three young boys in Durham, North Carolina, gives Claude access to her email so he can create travel itineraries and fill the shared family calendar with events and memories. However, she told me that she tries to treat it as a deterministic algorithm rather than “a figure in the family’s life” – she doesn’t talk to Claude about her children or ask him for parenting advice, and she has conditioned him not to praise her or offer unsolicited help. Goldstein sees the appeal of an AI family assistant but rejects its premise. Tools like Ollie, she told me, “feel like another way to raise the bar for what families should achieve in a way that makes me want to put a blanket over my head.”
What Goldstein rejects—and what AI family assistants both address and reinforce—is the cultural hegemony of intensive parenting, the time- and research-intensive type of family life that explains why, for example, early 21st-century working mothers report spending comparable amounts of time on child care to their stay-at-home counterparts of the 1970s. Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College, told me that “there is a kind of intractability to the cultural imperative of so-called intensive mothering.” She doubts that an AI family assistant can solve the problem. These women “can’t use AI to give themselves ‘me time’ because they think they shouldn’t have ‘me time,'” Schor said.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/progress-report/the-ai-gender-gap-meets-the-parenting-gender-gap
