2007: a Blandy house-keeper
I’ve been thinking about this thing they keep going on about on the telly—“Artificial Intelligence.” They said it was going to change everything, though I can’t see how it could do much for me except maybe find my missing teaspoons or stop the washing machine from eating socks. They were showing it on one of those breakfast programmes, this clever woman with her hair all sharp and pointy like an art installation, saying AI will “revolutionise domestic life.”
I thought she meant a sort of robot—like the little vacuum one that goes round in circles bumping into chair legs. But she kept saying learning algorithms and neural nets, and I felt a bit thick, because the only nets I know about are the ones I hang the apples in down the cellar, and those don’t learn much, except how to collapse when they get too heavy.
They say it can write things. Stories, letters, even the news. They didn’t say anything about whether it could scrub the scullery floor or iron a shirt without leaving that shiny bit along the seam. If it can, I’ll gladly give it a uniform and a name—let it try running this house when the boiler’s moody and the silver tarnishes overnight. If it can manage the linen room and keep the schedule straight when the Lady changes her mind about the guest bedding, then I’ll believe it’s intelligent.
But there are some jobs, I think, that can’t be replaced, not really. You can teach a machine to fold, maybe, but not to know which napkin looks best with which china. Nor can it keep a secret when the family’s having one of their “domestic misunderstandings.” Machines don’t know when to knock softly and when to vanish into the background; they don’t know kindness or discretion or how to make tea strong enough to comfort someone who’s been crying.
I remember my grandmother, also housekeeper here long before me, telling me about the jobs that vanished in her day. The carriage-maker went when the cars came. The slubber doffers—what a name!—gone when the mills changed their spindles. Pin setters at the bowling lanes replaced by machines that never shouted or snuck a fag behind the alley. Knocker-uppers, bless them, who woke folks in the dark with long sticks on windows—gone when alarm clocks got cheap. Lamp lighters too, and switchboard operators, and resurrectionists (which gave me quite a turn when I first heard it—digging up bodies, she meant!). Projectionists in the cinemas, rail signallers, lift operators, human computers—women with pencils and heads like calculators, she said—clock keepers, lectors, milkmen, even the dunny men. She’d list them off like saints in a litany of the vanished.
Still, the family stayed. So did we, in one form or another. Somebody must keep the household breathing—dust doesn’t care what century it is. Grandma used to say, “Servants to the rich, they’ll never be replaced, not entirely. Humans need humans.” I think that’s true. You can make all the clever machines you like, but a house isn’t just walls and functions. It’s people knowing each other’s ways, smoothing the corners, remembering birthdays, not saying aloud what oughtn’t to be said.
Still, it makes you wonder. If this artificial intelligence is as clever as they claim, will it ever understand the feeling of carrying a tray into a drawing room and knowing exactly how far to bow, or hearing a baby laugh from the nursery and thinking, “Well, something in this house is still alive”?
Maybe one day the family will have a talking toaster that gives me orders or a robot that calls itself the butler—I hope it has better manners than the last man who tried. But until the machines can notice the daffodils opening by the kitchen window and think they look like trumpets welcoming spring, I reckon my job is safe enough.
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