Paper short abstract:

Using the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) technology integrated into smartphones (e.g. Siri and Cortana), this talk considers practices of counting and computation through an analysis of affect, gender and labor.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last five years, we have seen the rise of a new generation of 'soft AI' digital assistants like Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Alexa, all designed with feminized personas. In this paper, we connect these AI assistants to the long history of the secretary, beginning with the earliest instantiations of the women as the first 'computers.' How have the practices of gendered computation and assistance been reinvoked in AI agents? How do AI secretaries present new relationships to counting, computation and the increasing entanglements of bodies and data? Siri and her sisters perform a kind of 'taking count', as their predecessors once did, but with deep and transversal insights into the digital activities of their 'boss.' Where once the human secretary could try to imagine their boss's needs in advance, the AI assistant can predict behavior through a constant surveillance of email, calendars, texts and online interactions. Agency becomes increasingly murky in an always-on relationship to intimate surveillance. Within the context of constant proximity to one's secretary comes constant counting, monitoring, anticipation and response. An AI secretary plays many roles, of affect, of reliability, of being enmeshed in the many facets of one's connected movements and activities. But the types of insight available to an AI assistant are limited to the tools that also convey and drive work practices: rather than being the employee within an office setting, they bridge the home-work divide in ways that have implications for both concepts of time and labor politics.