Abstract
Can we develop a method of regulating AI to protect families, households, children, and relationships? We want AI to do the dishes, not to raise our children. Scholars in family law and family dynamics in sociology and economics have worked to refine and explain characterizations of family life in ways that might help to formulate the challenges ahead. Where a characterization of family life is too thin, these scholarly efforts let us see the costs of conventional or incomplete understandings. For example, just because we are at home, doesn’t mean we aren’t working. Just because it is with and for a family member, doesn’t mean it isn’t work.This essay applies the literature about the complexity of family caregiving to a basic question: is AI displacing tedious labor we want to be rid of when it engages in childrearing work? This essay concludes that AI in families has taken on work that people don’t actually seek to delegate. AI thus threatens to reshape the character of caregiving simply because the technological capacity to do so exists.