GD901 Research Dissertation

'Living with AI: Exploring the shifting digital dynamics of domesticity'

Dissertation context

Throughout my studies so far, I have been fascinated by the ways in which digital technologies are transforming our everyday lives. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a powerful example of this, as one of the fastest-growing and adopted technologies in history. The global AI market is expected to grow more than twenty times by 2030, reaching a value of over £1.5 trillion. Despite this expansion and a major shift in AI research and application, there remains a lack of research on how the everyday nature of AI technologies, even as they fundamentally reshape our daily lives and environments.

The home has become a major space for AI technologies to proliferate, conveniently mediating the mundane practices of daily life. This research explores the home, as an ‘arena of everyday life’, which has been fundamentally transformed by these digital dynamics, with a plethora of AI technologies now meditating and reconfiguring lived domestic experiences.

Dissertation supervisor

Dr Nicholas Bernards

Goals/aims

Despite its recent proliferation into everyday life, AI’s integration into contemporary domesticity and the profound impacts of this remain underexplored. This research seeked to address this gap through an exploratory, qualitative approach which critically examined the industry discourse surrounding the deployment of AI technologies in the home, which was compared to the everyday, lived realities of how AI is encountered, experienced and perceived by consumers in domestic spaces. By comparing these perspectives, this study aimed to offer an empirically grounded conceptual contribution to the evolving understandings of domesticity in the contemporary digital era, highlighting the complex and often messy ways AI is appropriated and embodied within diverse domestic lives. By adopting a people-centred, qualitative approach, this research aimed to offer a constructive view on AI, to explore how it can co-exist with consumers in the most sustainable manner.

Outcomes/conclusions

• AI is increasingly becoming embedded into ‘everyday arena’ of home, but this is by no means ‘seamless’.
• ‘AI’ is not a singular, monolithic technology; it is embodied and material, comprising a diverse array of technologies that carry various meanings, values and experiences across different lives.
• Clear discrepancies were noticed between the often-utopian imaginaries of the tech industry and the complex realities of living with AI – imaginaries overlook the inherently messy nature of unique AI domestic appropriation
• Whilst consumers generally acknowledged the general benefits of AI’s capabilities in achieving the industry ideals of ‘convenience’ and ‘control’, the ways in which unique households rendered AI meaningful within their domestic dynamics varied significantly, shaped by specific needs, routines and values of each household – which is not accounted for by the technology industry and calls for nuanced engagement with these notions.
• The industry notion of convenience was contested by hidden complexities, such as ‘digital housekeeping’ burdens, the reinforcement of domestic gendered labour inequities and socio-economic disparities in accessibility.
• The industry notion of control is underpinned by the entanglement of homes within the global capitalist web, transforming them into arenas for data capture and commercialisation, questioning the notion of home as a private and intimate space and whether AI truly gives us ‘control’ over our home spaces.
• By critically engaging with the industry’s simplified narratives of seamless integration, the home should not be seen as a simple, passive hub for technological integration - integrating AI into domestic life involves complexity, conflict and compromise.

Future research aspirations

Importantly, this capstone project provided a much richer range of topics than could be sufficiently addressed. As such, I am now conducting an ESRC-funded PhD in Human geography at UCL, where I will be exploring this intersection between the domestic and the digital further to critically engage with how AI technologies are transforming everyday, domestic life, to then unveil the implications of this, and what this means for how we geographically understand the home. I hope this research has a role to play in guiding further domestic AI advancements and policy, whilst also retaining its high translatability into lay knowledge and educating consumers on the way in which AI functions in homes.