If AI could keep its head when mom is losing hers
Earlier this year, I made a dumb financial decision. I bought a car that was beyond our budget.
We had just been through an eight-week stretch of demanding work schedules, kitchen renovations and cheque-account fraud.
Our daughter’s day-care centre closed three times for a Covid-19 outbreak, a bout of norovirus and a water leak. Not exactly tragedies, but when our old car died, my fried brain had no bandwidth for comparison shopping. I walked into a dealership and said I would look at whatever they had on the lot. I left with a car and a car loan.
How did I become the kind of person who buys a car on impulse? Cognitive overload. It can have real financial costs.
But what if I had an AI assistant to keep track of the chaos — or offloaded the car research to ChatGPT? Maybe my brain would have been capable of better decisions. Maybe my bank account would look a little healthier now.
Entrepreneur Avni Patel Thompson thinks families like mine could use some automated support. She is working on a subscription service called Milo that uses a mix of GPT-4 and human intervention to keep track of family schedules, grocery lists and other mundanities.
One parent might text a screenshot of a school email to Milo, which would realise that buried in the fifth paragraph is a reminder that Pajama Day is May 18. Milo could then send each parent reminders to make sure the children go off to school in their sleepwear.
I could imagine Milo or another AI-powered productivity app not only managing information but working with other AIs to get stuff done. Now, Milo can keep track of your children’s coming birthday parties. In future, maybe it will work with Amazon.com to order the gifts, too.
Systems like this could be especially helpful to mothers. A survey conducted by Motherly suggests millennial moms are the most burnt out, with more than half saying we “frequently” or “always” feel overwhelmed. While stay-at-home moms report higher rates of burnout than working ones, levels for both groups are high — 47% of full-time working moms feel burnt out compared with 56% of those who stay home.
To cope with these feelings, millennial and Gen Z moms ask their partners to do more. And working moms are especially willing to use their extra earning power to outsource the handson tasks. But until now, it has been difficult to outsource the cognitive labour. Researchers say that, when asked, most husbands take on the laundry, cooking and cleaning. But the mental load — noticing what needs doing, planning to do it, reminding everyone to follow through — is disproportionately carried by women.
MORE NOTICING
Research by Allison Daminger, a professor of sociology at the University of WisconsinMadison, shows through extensive interviews with couples that men and women tend to share responsibility for research and decision-making, while women do more noticing (this will need doing soon) and monitoring (is anyone actually doing this?). And women tend to have more household responsibilities overall. Women thus do more cognitive labour.
Some of it can be fun, of course. There can be creativity involved in planning meals, satisfaction in organising the family vacation, joy in writing holiday cards. But a lot of it is mind-numbing. It is your turn to do school pickup. Did you remember to put the trash out? We are almost out of coffee.
While AI is stealing jobs, could it please take this one?
It may not be that easy. Glitches can happen, familiar to anyone who has used an online calendar to manage the family schedule. As with many technologies, early adopters could be limited to the most educated, affluent households. I can imagine a future in which rich women delegate their cognitive labour to a bot that in turn sends instructions to the working-class women cleaning their houses and delivering their groceries, limiting human-tohuman contact. It is not a happy prospect.
There is a broader caveat. Daminger points out that though many labour-saving devices have entered households over the past 100 years, from vacuum cleaners and washing machines to lawnmowers, people still spend a lot of time on household labour — the hours just migrate to other tasks. For example, working women now spend more time with their children than stay-athome moms did 50 years ago. AI assistants could allow parenting to further intensify.
Yet, the idea of offloading some cognitive labour is appealing — especially because delegating the nagging to an app might reduce marital tension. Using technology to automate some household tasks could reduce the time spent negotiating over who does what
— fraught conversations that can feel as tense as UN climate talks.
It might even help women with their careers if it frees up time for paid work and mental space for new ideas. Author Jane Austen spoke for many when she wrote to her sister: “Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb.” Perhaps that is why, when I have talked about the idea of automating some of the mental load, women’s eyes light up.
There are risks involved in sharing evermore personal information with tech services, and it is easy for a helpful tool to become one more task. But the invisible job of remembering, reminding and researching also exacts a toll. As my shiny new car can attest.
WHILE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS STEALING JOBS, COULD IT PLEASE TAKE THIS ONE?