Would automating emotional labor constitute progress?

Or would it just freeze our current prejudices in place?

A few years ago, while I was still living in New York, I had dinner in Hamilton Heights with a couple of good friends. One of them brought a fourth person. Someone they had recently met: a data scientist who was an evangelist for the immense hope and power contained in technological advances.

Technology was blind, our dinner companion advanced. With the advent of online spaces and the use of numbers uninhibited by subjectivity, race and gender – among many other categories causing discrimination – could be erased.

I squinted.

One of my friends challenged our new acquaintance. He talked about the use of crime statistics, average income and zip codes by insurance companies to decide whether or not to insure people within entire neighborhoods. How were these blanket decisions non-discriminatory? How exactly was that advancement?

The supposed blindness of data was allowing us to profile entire blocks of people. It was these very numbers that were justifying whether people had access to insurance – and at what cost.  

Our data scientist remained certain, unmoved.

I chimed in with anecdotes and insight from a story I had done for The Guardian on stop-and-frisk moving online after being found to be unconstitutional in New York courts.

Police officers from the NYPD were spying on adults, teenagers and children as young as 10 years old across Harlem and other majority non-white neighborhoods. These were people whose surveillance began as they had committed no crime but were still categorized as being part of a “gang” based on geographical location alone. Officers were posing as children to spy, collect data and watch on.

Racial profiling was well and truly alive, I contended – if anything its move online and the use of technologies had just made it harder for victims and communities to tackle and confront it.

In a paper I later co-authored with leading academics, including Desmond Patton, who is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, we wrote “the same cognitive and social controls that dominate the everyday lived experiences of people of color in the United States are those which dictate who is watched and what is seen online.”

My argument stirred our new acquaintance little.

Would it surprise you to learn that our dinner companion – unlike the rest of us – was both male and white? I think they would have liked to think that they were purely talking from the vantage point of a data scientist. That they were the calm, “objective” party.

Technology doesn’t magically free us from systems of power or discrimination. Left unchecked, technology, social media, the use of numbers and data tend to just mirror what is happening in the world around us, as it is – suffocating flaws and all.

This was true then and it continues to be true today. Women online are bullied and harassed – sometimes to death – in a way that mirrors in-person harassment. The fact that they are writing online and have an online avatar doesn’t free them from this very real threat.

I was reminded of this conversation recently as I reflected on the ubiquitous use of Alexa and Siri, among other feminized virtual assistant technologies that so many of us interact with daily.

Not only is this entrenching our view of what someone who helps us with menial tasks is named and sounds like, it is potentially making our relationship to these tasks and who executes them even more feminized and devalued, even more distant and dehumanized.

What are children learning when they hear a parent say: “Alexa, lights off” accompanied by no hello, no please, no thank you?

Forty years ago, Angela Davis wrote of the need to socialize housework, rather than of the need to compensate it. As AI and automation continue to make headway, is replacing housework with robots that sound like artificial domestic goddesses with vaguely non-white names progress?

And if it is, where does the progress end, and where are we entrenching ourselves in reductive stereotypes that freeze in time who we currently think should be doing our invisible work with no gratitude and no recompense?

This is an ongoing musing of mine that troubles me, and I am curious to hear your thoughts or pieces of insight. If you have any, please do comment below, or hit reply in your emails.