You don't need help scheduling more things to do. You need to do less. These services often offer users to throw money at the problem (this is not very helpful if lack of money is one of the problems). Apps transform parents from workers to consumers and transform our to-do lists into shopping lists. Someone is still performing our “joy stealing” tasks, be it call center employees or many other invisible labors that artificial intelligence systems seem to perform automatically. You may be one of them.
The boundary between humans and artifacts is slippery. Johana emphasizes that it employs “actual humans (not AI chatbots) who can do the heavy lifting,” but those humans use generative AI to assist, according to Forbes. It is said that there is they Along with our mission. When these services refer to themselves as “worker bees,” “secret helpers,” or “fairy godmothers,” they use fantasy to mask the harsh reality of outsourcing “grunt work” to an anonymized workforce. It relies on iconography.
The jobs these services hope to eradicate (or at least obscure) are feminized. It was “a woman's work” and in fact most of Johanna's helpers had women's names. She says one of the most helpful things a virtual assistant can do is allocate family burdens more equitably among members, but this duty is commonly dismissed as “nagging.”
Last year, Megan Verena Joyce, CEO of Duckbill, another delegation service, said that artificial intelligence “has efficiencies and customization capabilities” that could “disproportionately impact women.” “It has the potential to play an important role in alleviating the social and economic burden of the current situation.” ”
Illustrations on Yohana's website show a typical user holding a baby in a sling, securing a square of wrapping paper under the leg, balancing a bowl of dog food on the raised leg, and stirring a pot. She is depicted as a woman wearing glasses. She types on computer with one hand. She resembles Rosie from The Jetsons, with each mechanical limb firing autonomously to work more efficiently. We're all familiar with her AI helpers modeled after female stereotypes, such as Apple's girlfriend Siri, but it feels like the opposite is happening here. Her mother is transformed into a robot-like being whose work is dismissed as mechanical and easily outsourced.
In the weeks I spent as a virtual assistant taskmaster, I learned that much of the busy work that apps claim is actually deeply personal, often challenging, and sometimes transformative. I noticed.