on laundry and dishes
swords towards the right enemy
Science fiction has undoubtedly influenced our assumptions about Artificial Intelligence. We anthropomorphise the machine and it makes criticism amorphous. The binary code of ones and zeroes get chastised for the environmental, ethical and cognitive sins that it’s creators, it’s benefactors and it’s society are responsible for.
Maciejewska’s maxim offers a principled defence of creativity against the “threat of AI” but, like many twitter quotes destined for slogan-hood, its pithiness conceals a subterranean truth. Maciejewska romanticises the artist at the expense of meniality.
Of course, this is partially because domestic work is suspended in a state of quasi-labour—historically performed by housewives in exchange for room, board and the sanctified opportunity to take care of a husband, only ever crossing into the category of “real work” if you’re rich enough to hire a cleaner. For the rest of us, housework remains unpaid.
But for many, it is work that AI would be “taking away”.
Culturally, we are flippant about work and workers like this.
To be employed by McDonald’s is to believe one’s life-path has been road-blocked by a brick-wall. Self-destructive fantasies of the “fuck it” persuasion are frequently followed by the intention to become a stripper. Wryness thinly veils the contempt with these jobs that are considered existential rock-bottoms, worse than rock, the hot wet dirt we plunge into when faced with failure too monumental to bounce back from.
The most vocal capitalist you know will evangelise about this system’s raw efficiency yet it is spends much of its finite energy devaluing people in order to exploit them.
What does it mean to conceive of AI as a kind-of person in a society that cannot reckon with how it treats the actual people it stratifies as kind-of persons?
The AI “stealing your job” is but a virtual immigrant—wielded as a pawn by corporate authorities to transfer the wealth they save by not paying you a salary and lining their own pockets as their pupil dilate into dollar signs like Scrooge McDuck.
Nothing is New occasionally falls into the trap of directing ire towards Artificial Intelligence itself. Its conception on theft, its environmental impact and its baffling unpredictability are concerning and as an entity, it feels too complex to be considered merely a tool but not complex enough to be considered sentient. Nevertheless, any ire is far better directed at those attempting to benefit from AI while disenfranchising people and the planet.
The tension at the heart of Maciejewska’s laundry maxim is not between artistic and menial labour but between those who want to exploit work and those who don’t. More than I want AI to do anything for me, I want anyone who’s livelihood is under threat by those who’d quicker employ poorly-functioning machinery over qualified people to be protected from this corporate obsession with convenience and cancerous growth. I don’t want AI to do my dishes, I want to make sure the dish-washers are safe.
EXACTLY. Pardon the overly long comment upcoming, but you made me think of something that I find fascinating—
There’s a corollary to — and support for — your point here, too, in that somebody could ALSO easily just become a very unfulfilled mess of a person if they even DID “ai-off-load” SUBSISTENCE-labor rather than wage labor.
Like, the primacy of “making more art” in the quote you sample— as the only thing we’d be doing if not working— feels like evidence that its author doesn’t understand labor in any other context than capitalism. It’s like she thinks that all the human body and mind unshackled from capitalism can be used for is intellectual pursuits. And that kinda reeks of western-enlightenment/cartesian-dualism kind of stuff, to me at least.
And to be clear, intellectual pursuits ARE important pursuits, but they’re not the ONLY ones worth spending time on, whether when living with wage-labor as a reality or not.
Yes, discounting manual labor as unworthy of “humans” not only suggests that those who DO end up tasked with that work are deemed “less than,” but it also might suggest that exerting oneself in endeavors OTHER THAN those considered more “high class” and therefore, arguably, more self-satisfied and entitled to praise (e.g; “art,” entertainment) are not worthy of us either.
But that attitude really doesn’t seem to engage with anthropological history as it regards how humans have spent their time/WITH whom for the vast majority of human history/before the advent of industrial-civilization.
Hell, plenty of indigenous people (apropos enough, a demographic over represented in the same socio-economic pool singled-out by implication when devaluing WAGED manual labor, if/when they get pulled into the capitalist system) have survived and continue to survive by way of subsistence labor to varying degrees; growing/foraging for/hunting a fair amount of their own food, building their own housing, etc. And that is usually something done as a divided-labor task; sure, every person might have a different role that they’re good at and stick with, BUT that doesn’t DEVALUE the other people’s roles by default. Just because you’re “an artist” and therefore “smart” doesn’t mean the carpenter or the gardener is lowly by comparison or “not smart.”
The point is not that the “hand work” is somehow more dignified or more “close to nature” than that of the mind, inherently (another basis for unhelpful myths about “noble savages” and whatnot)— but rather that intellectual subsistence labor (e.g: communal-bonding labor like setting up spiritual ceremonies) and physical subsistence labor (e.g: sourcing the food that those worshippers eat) cannot exist without each other. You can’t separate the manual from the intellectual because the people who are good at each NEED each other to survive.
Even if/when we live in a world where free-market relations no longer exist— there is still required a basic respect for each other’s roles. To sound annoyingly grad-school about it, a “dialectic “ is certainly present there!
Rugged individualism and the myth of “the lone genius” will leave you isolated, skill-less, or both: unable to enjoy your 21st century luxuries because you’ve devalued the workforce needed to sustain it so much that they’ll all get replaced by robots who do the job shittily; and/or unable to live in a collective fashion with others who happen to have different skills than you, because you’re too busy thinking you’re better than them to realize that you need each other.
Oof.
I enjoy all your work, but I am just LOVING your pieces on AI- so bloody good. Thank you for this