Dear friends,

In my last post, I wrote about the automation of housework. Naturally, that conversation led me here. To some of the most draining work many of us will ever do: raising a child.

With the recent boom in generative AI, we are seeing a rise in AI toys. It has me asking a difficult question: What does it look like to be a parent when we assign machines to perform our emotional labor?

This post is an intervention against a twisted logic—the idea that the resource-heavy 'extraction' of a data center is worth more energy and investment than the life-making labor of building a human being.

By necessity, this piece is deeply personal. It is also deeply political.

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The Exhaustion of Emotional Labor

During the pandemic, I spent twelve months as a full-time caregiver to my first child while my wife went back to work. At 45, the intensity was a physical shock to a Highly Sensitive Person like myself.

What I came to understand was that the real challenge came largely from managing my own feelings in order to create a desired emotional state in another human being.

This is what Arlie Hochschild famously called ‘emotional labor’.

In moments of bone-deep exhaustion, when my son demanded that I become Elmo or Cookie Monster, I had to summon that voice from somewhere inside the depletion. That deep acting, reshaping my internal state to meet his need, is precisely what makes parental care truly draining. And yet, it is also what makes it one of the most rewarding work a person can do.

When my son became a toddler, he began to mirror my internal world. When I conjured Elmo through fatigue, I was showing him that care is reciprocal, that intimacy is built from a loop of constantly building on each other’s feelings.

Parenting is not a one-way street. It is a mutual becoming.

AI-Powered Toys

Advanced AI companion robots are now marketed as if they can interact with children and grow alongside them. Industrialists are selling the idea that machines can soothe and tutor.

In a recent conversation in Interactions magazine, an AI researcher describes an “empathy deficit” at the core of current AI systems. Large language models can simulate “cognitive empathy” predicting what someone might feel based on data but they lack “affective empathy”. What it means is that they do not feel the weight of another person’s vulnerability.

I would not call that care, because caring is so much more than a performance of soothing words.

Political theorist Joan Tronto argues that care has integrity only when it completes a full cycle: caring about (noticing need), caring for (taking responsibility), care-giving (the act itself), and care-receiving (the response that closes the loop).

When I used my Cookie Monster voice while exhausted, I was completing that loop. I noticed his need. I took responsibility. I gave care. And my son received it, and gave something back.

AI-powered toys can mimic care-giving, but they cannot care for. They do not worry about a child’s future.

This is before we even get to the privacy risks, including the recent leak of conversations between children and chatbot-powered toys made by the Mumbai-based company Miko, and broader expert warnings that children talking to ChatGPT-powered toys are being exposed to unsolicited and harmful contents.

Realistically, these toys are often just a sophisticated upgrade from a tablet—but one that demands significantly more parental supervision (see my previous post regarding the added mental load created by the digitalization of household communication).

These are real and urgent threats. But my critique of AI childcare goes further than them.

The ‘Value’ of Life-Making

There is a form of work that often goes unnamed, yet it is what keeps the world turning: the slow, quiet process of ‘making a person’. It encompasses all the unpaid, invisible efforts that happen behind the scenes—the feeding, the diaper-changing, and the exhausting labor of building emotional intelligence. It is the work of shaping a life so that, one day, that life can step out into the world.

Under our current system, this labor has always been at odds with the clock. Capitalism demands that we be efficient and productive, yet raising a human is inherently slow and inefficient.

This might explain why tech executives like Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, reportedly view raising a child as a “waste of energy.” To a mind obsessed with optimization, a data center is valuable because it generates economic value and profits. Childrearing is seen as a “waste” because it doesn’t produce a profit margin.

But that “waste” is exactly where the meaning of life lives. This perspective reveals a fundamental misjudgment of what the bond between a parent and child actually is.

Not all our relationships are transactional. Intimacy and co-creation are the very foundations of being human.

The question we should be asking is: who benefits from returning us to “productive” work faster? If capitalism once sought to own our working hours, it now seeks to monetize our off-the-clock intimacy.

In many parts of the world, where the friction between life-making and profit-making becomes unbearable, people are pushing back by abstaining from life-making altogether.

Until we as a society align our values with our daily practices, no amount of robots or AI can resolve these tensions. We will continue to hollow out our homes and our sense of self until we face the fact that we don't live to work; we work to sustain the 'wasteful,' beautiful labor of life-making.

Until next times,

Kiang

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