Who Does the Caring When AI Does the Work?
In many feminist discussions on AI, we talk largely about the unequal gendered consequences of artificial intelligence: how AI can reproduce existing biases, why women are more cautious about adopting it, and the harm it can cause. What we talk about much less is the other side of the equation: why men may be particularly enthusiastic about incorporating AI into everyday life.
One possible answer lies in a familiar feature of heterosexual relationships. Men have historically been able to outsource much of the administrative and relational labor of maintaining a household and its relationships to women. AI has automated the labour while leaving the gendered expectation intact.
Anthropology has a term for some of this work: kin-keeping—the seemingly minor but continuous acts through which relationships are maintained. Remembering birthdays, buying presents, arranging visits, choosing cards, checking in with relatives, making reservations and remembering preferences may look trivial individually, but collectively they constitute a substantial amount of labor and are essential connective tissue in relationships.
Another key term in this context is the ‘mental load.’ The mental load refers to the largely invisible task of the ongoing planning, anticipating, remembering and organizing required before even the physical tasks are carried out. For example, the necessity of having clean dishes requires not only the physical task of washing dishes, but also the mental task of remembering that the household is low on dish soap or dishwasher tablets, if there is a preferred brand or smell, what stores currently have the best price for these products, etc.
The emerging AI assistant can remember, anticipate, organize and prompt. In other words, it can to some extent perform the kinds of invisible labor that women have disproportionately been expected to perform for generations. However, rather than a tool to redistribute that labor, it can allow the people who have historically avoided it to continue avoiding it.
I recently saw a commercial that illustrated this point plainly. The commercial follows a heterosexual couple on their anniversary and how the advertised AI assistant fits into their relationship. The woman uses the AI assistant to prompt the man with a reminder of their anniversary and guide him through all of the tasks necessary to make the anniversary happen – from booking a reservation at a restaurant the AI ‘remembered’ they enjoyed, and ordering flowers that are the girlfriend’s favorite.
Like most technological advances and tools, there is a scenario in which this could be a radical tool to help redistribute labor and move further towards a more equitable division. However, it falls into exacerbating existing social inequalities. In the scenario above is the technology helping him participate in a relationship—or helping him simulate the behaviours associated with participation? Because the problem is not simply that AI performs labour that women have traditionally performed. It is that some of that labour is itself a way of demonstrating care. Remembering someone's favourite flowers is not merely an administrative task; the remembering is part of the affection. AI can potentially perform the observable behaviours associated with care: remembering a birthday, selecting flowers, booking a restaurant, writing a message.
But those behaviours traditionally have another function: they demonstrate that the person knows you, remembers you, thinks about you and values the relationship. What happens when technology can copy the performance of care without requiring the user to learn how to care?
For More Information I would recommend:
Tiktoker and influencer @sheisapaigeturner has accounts almost entirely dedicated to the subject of the mental load
Laura Bates’ new book ‘The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny’
By: Mary O’Neill, Programme and Data Officer, WRDA