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Good morning.

This week the UK hosted the first global summit on Safety and Artificial Intelligence, though, based on some of the headlines, one could be forgiven for thinking that Elon Musk had hosted a summit on the world he’d like to live in. Two of his predictions have particularly captured attention: that technology will ‘do everything’, meaning humans can opt out of work that doesn’t offer ‘personal satisfaction’, and that AI friends could be better than human ones. As I listened to the promise of this bright new future and scraped my infant daughter’s rejected breakfast off the table, I smiled grimly. As a new mother, a lot of the tasks of the last 7 months have been quite unsatisfying. But the potential of a constantly cheerful nappy-changing night-soothing mother-bot, freeing me to live my best life now, misses the point of what a lot of human work and connection is for.

There are obviously dangerous and relentlessly monotonous jobs which diminish those with no other choice available. But what would happen if the everyday work of caring for each other was outsourced? The choices we make to care for or to harm each other are not the product of free, rational calculation, but the product of loving or unloving habit. If ordinary human agency, error, and finitude is removed from the intimate and difficult work of care, perhaps my daughter would be less likely to get a nappy rash. But we would still find ourselves diminished.

The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas describes the virtue of love as a habit made of doing acts of love over and over again. Knowing how to love each other requires practise. Over time, and through the grace of God, Aquinas says, this work will transform us, come more easily. He suggests we might even start to enjoy it. This transformation of our habits will require a letting go: we will have to give up ways of living which get in the way of loving each other. The Christian understanding of the virtues assumes that such limitations are a necessity and a good. We are made to be finite creatures, bound to the places and people that surround us, through whom we encounter love, and to whom we learn to offer love in return.

Of course, it’s one thing to theorise that this work is good for us and quite another to do it. Caring labour is difficult, exhausting, and frequently disgusting. But instead of trying to eliminate this work for as many people as possible in the name of efficiency or freedom, we might instead pursue a vision where the everyday labours of love are a collective endeavour, central to the good life. Creating a caring society won’t just happen on the whims of personal satisfaction. We’re all going to have to work for it.

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