How a Virtual Assistant Taught Me to Appreciate Busywork

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 urg... See more

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.

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 pe... See more

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 to... See more

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 godmother... See more

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.