Fantastic rant this morning from Maciej Ceglowski, creator of the invaluable Pinboard, about this new service:
“Hello Alfred Raises $10.5M To Automate Your Chores”. Part of the white-hot trend in scriptable people.
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) April 14, 2015
“Customers are assigned their own home manager, also called an Alfred, and those nameless managers take care of the work”
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) April 14, 2015
I’ve seen luxury apartments with a built-in “servant call” button resembling a doorbell, but I never expected the world wide web to get one
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) April 14, 2015
A nameless, fungible class of domestic workers is antithetical to a democratic society. That’s what undocumented immigrants are for
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) April 14, 2015
Next up: on-demand service that offshores your guilt about creating, enabling and participating in a new Gilded Age
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) April 14, 2015
The chief reason I keep arguing with Ned O’Gorman about whether things can want — latest installment here — is that I think the blurring of lines between the agency of animals (especially people) and the agency of made objects contributes to just this kind of thing: if we can script the Internet of Things why not script people too? Once they’re scripted they want what they’ve been scripted to do. (Obviously O’Gorman doesn’t want to see that happen any more than I do: our debate is about the tendencies of terms, not about substantive ethical and political questions.)
I'm not sure I see this new service as scriptable people so much as connecting piecework with laborers, much like Uber connects riders with drivers. It's part of a trend toward contracting and work-for-hire that relieves traditional employers of obligations to employees. There is plenty of blurring of lines between man and machine, anthropomorphizing the latter and reducing the former to cogs in depersonalized processes, but the example you cite probably isn't one of them.