From ELIZA to Alexa:

In examining the automation of care labour in conversational AI, this essay attends to the ongoing feminist concerns of care and care labour and their imbrications in racial capitalism. I draw on Hi’ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese’s work, which identifies care’s radical world re-making potential is activated when care responds to “the inequitable dynamics” that characterise the present. I take Hobart and Kneese’s theorisation of care as a feminist method in my discussion of AI, care, and care labour. To adequately address these topics, I ground my discussion in “the inequitable dynamics” that structure the social world; more specifically, I examine the racialised and gendered hierarchies that shape care labour and AI. Through this feminist perspective, my essay examines how contemporary assistants like Alexa and Siri automate not just care labour, but also its structuring hierarchies of gender, race, class, and citizenship in racial capitalism. My essay does not rest with a critique of AI. While continuing to build on Hobart and Kneese’s theorisations of care, my essay concludes with a discussion of Stephanie Dinkins’ artwork Not the Only One and its reconfiguration of AI’s relation to care and care labour. In part a response to AI’s marginalisation of Black communities, Not the Only One centers the oral histories told by three Black women and conjures other possible technological worlds from a data justice perspective and an engagement with Dinkins’ concept of algorithmic care.