I recently downloaded a virtual assistant that promised to ease the burdens of modern parenthood. The app is called Yohana, and it offered to handle a pile of tasks on my behalf. It suggested enlisting a professional to wash my windows, scheduling a lesson with a “private sports coach” or planning a “stylish and sustainable” Earth Day party featuring décor, recipes, activities and party favors, none of which interested me. Finally it volunteered to produce a “chef-curated menu” for Passover.
Well, sure. I was already planning on attending a friend’s Seder, and at least this task did not involve Yohana siccing an expert on me or making me host an elaborate event. So, I agreed to the Passover idea. Yohana assigned the “to-do” to a faceless assistant identified only by a first name. The next day, she sent along a confusing list of menu options that included a recipe for ham mini quiches — a provocative choice.
Yohana is one of a growing crew of virtual-assistant apps that combine artificial intelligence and human labor to help parents manage their family lives. For $129 a month, Yohana promises to “offload joy-stealing tasks, improve your family’s well-being, and find more breathing room in your schedule.” Ohai ($26.99 a month), a text-based “A.I. household assistant,” wants to “lighten the mental load of Chief Household Officers,” and Milo ($40/month, with a wait list), an “A.I. co-pilot,” hopes to calm “every form of family chaos.”
These apps are styled like cutesy helpmeets, and their names — Yohana, Ohai, Milo — would be at home on a Brooklyn day care roster. Though pitched to “busy parents,” they implicitly target affluent working mothers who are struggling to manage household tasks on top of work and child care, and who might even be convinced to spend some (though not too much) extra cash to make them go away. But when I gave Yohana a spin, I found that I did not want to do the things she can manage, and that she cannot manage the things I want to do. She made me start to believe that the busywork I might delegate to a machine is actually more human, and valuable, than I realized.
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Mothers have long been served fantasies about how robots will relieve the drudgery of housework. In the first episode of the animated sitcom “The Jetsons,” from 1962, Jane Jetson tires of pressing all the buttons that automatically cook and clean for her, so she buys Rosie the robot maid to run her smart house instead. In 1965, General Electric urged housewives to “Let a Mobile Maid Dishwasher give you priceless time for the wife-and-mother jobs that really count.”
And yet automation has failed to eliminate the burdens of those “wife-and-mother jobs.” In a culture that promotes ruthless competition and intensive mothering, a mother’s tasks (the ones that “really count”) are capable of expanding endlessly.
The feminist campaign to demand “wages for housework,” which also captured the maternal imagination in the 1960s and ’70s, represented the flip side of the automation fantasy. As Barbara Ehrenreich documented in her 2000 essay “Maid to Order,” that campaign dissolved as professional women instead opted to pay other women to clean their houses for them, often under lousy conditions. Now a modern wealthy mother can have it all: She can use her phone to command a robot-esque “assistant” to hire a human cleaner on her behalf, without having to actually look anyone in the face.
In their brand copy, these apps speak of lifting loads — “mental loads,” “invisible loads.” They suggest that the central challenge of parenthood is bureaucratic. Families should be “about love, not logistics,” Milo says.
But in a bid to banish bureaucracy, these services add layer upon layer. They suggest we hire more helpers, schedule more activities, plan more events. (An Earth Day party with recyclable décor? No. Private sports coaching? Absolutely not!) When I signed up for Ohai, it texted me every morning, asking if it could add a workout to my schedule.
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I don’t need help scheduling more things to do; I need to do less. Often these services suggest that users throw money at that problem (which is not very helpful if one of your problems is that you do not have enough money). The apps transform parents from workers into consumers, translating our to-do lists into shopping lists. Somebody is still performing our “joy-stealing” tasks, and it may be a call center worker or one of the many other invisible laborers who make artificial intelligence systems seem to run automatically.
The boundary between the human and the artificial is slippery; Yohana emphasizes that it employs “actual humans (not A.I. chatbots) that can do the grunt work,” though according to Forbes, those humans are using generative A.I. to assist them with our tasks. When these services style themselves as “worker bees,” “secret helpers” or “fairy godmothers,” they lean on the iconography of fantasy to obscure the grimmer reality of farming out your “grunt work” to an anonymized labor force.
The work that these services hope to eradicate (or at least obscure) is feminized. It’s “women’s work,” and indeed, most of my Yohana helpers had feminine first names. One of the most helpful things a virtual assistant can do is assign family burdens more equitably among its members, a duty commonly demeaned as “nagging.”
Last year, Meghan Verena Joyce, the chief executive of another task delegation service, Duckbill, argued that “with its capabilities for efficiency and customization,” artificial intelligence “could play a crucial role in easing the societal and economic burdens that disproportionately affect women.”
In an illustration on Yohana’s website, a typical user is portrayed as a bespectacled woman who wears a baby in a sling, anchors a square of wrapping paper under a foot, balances a bowl of dog food on a lifted leg, stirs a pot with one hand and types on a computer with the other. She resembles Rosie from the Jetsons, each mechanical limb firing autonomously in order to labor more efficiently. We are familiar with A.I. helpers, like Apple’s Siri, which are modeled after feminine stereotypes, but here it feels as if the opposite is happening: A mother has been recast as a robotic being, her work dismissed as rote and easily outsourced.
In the few weeks that I spent as a virtual-assistant taskmaster, I realized that much of the busywork claimed by the apps is actually quite personal, often rewarding and occasionally transformative.
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For instance, when I asked Yohana where I could shop locally for a child’s birthday party, it spat out links to Amazon toys instead. And when I asked if it could find a worker-owned cooperative cleaning service (there are many in New York City), it did not; instead it linked me to the profile of an app, Quicklyn, hosted on another app, Thumbtack. An app can suggest a volunteer opportunity that welcomes children, but it can’t do what my neighbor did, which was add me to the WhatsApp group organizing mutual aid for the nearby migrant shelter. It can direct me to a national database of registered caregivers but not to the teenage babysitter who lives three floors above me.
When I alerted my Yohana assistants to some of these issues — the Passover ham, the Amazon links — they dutifully fixed them, though it’s hard to imagine a worse use of my time than reforming the stranger I’d hired to fix my life through my phone. These services may be able to plug users into corporate-mediated experiences, but no amount of machine learning can simulate neighborhood bonds. “Grunt work” can be central to building community, but only if you do it yourself.