Robert dos Santos’s call to be more human, to connect and to challenge AI and the dark cloud it’s set to bring upon humanity is certainly laudable – a valiant rallying cry for the dystopian, uncertain times we’re living through (I’m asking people to do a lot, but that’s what it means to be a human’: why one man made the first straight-to-video movie in 20 years, 4 June). However, I found one comment the film-maker made baffling: “Someone once said that if your mum can do it, it doesn’t have value.”
It’s frustrating that, in a world where we’ve made so much progress to combat everyday sexism, a sentiment like this could still be reeled off in a national newspaper. But also, who once said this? Whoever it was, they were clearly wrong. After all, how many mothers are doctors, artists, scientists, lawyers, cleaners, social workers, teachers? Does their work not have any value? Not to mention the unpaid domestic labour that mothers so often shoulder – the bedrock that holds up society and our economy.
In a 2016 report from the Office for National Statistics, women were found to do more than 60% more unpaid labour than men – and that unpaid work overall has a value of £1.01tn, equivalent to approximately 56% of gross domestic product. It’s ironic that an article challenging sloppy, mindless thinking should say such a thing. After all, it is perhaps this unpaid labour that most defines our humanity in opposition to AI.
The work of caring for elderly relatives, of changing nappies, of kissing bruised knees still disproportionately falls to women. And it is this work – of loving, caring, nurturing – that seems least imperilled by AI. That really defines what it is to be human. Perhaps one positive outcome of the AI revolution might be that we value this invisible, vital work more – that we understand that it has value precisely because your mum does it.
Polly Creed
London
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