On Lauren Lee McCarthy’s “Lauren Human Intelligence Smart Home”

When I was a kid in the late 90s, Disney released an original movie Smart House featuring Katy Segal as an anthropomorphic automated home system named PAT (an acronym that stands for Personal Applied Technology). At first, PAT learns from being fed an abundance of 1950s media how to perform the role of a housewife (“tradwife” revival movement) and becomes beloved by her surrogate son, 13 year old tech wiz Ben, who programmed her to cater to his whims. Clashing expectations between Ben and his stricter father, however, ultimately cause PAT to malfunction under the weight of mixed messages and she glitches. Afraid that she may be replaced by a flesh-and-bones woman dating the family patriarch, PAT becomes wrathful, domineering and a threat to the family.

In her manifesto Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell urges readers to embrace the malfunction and claim “the right to range” especially for feminized subjects and racialized subjects (like mothers) who have been flattened by supremacy – in order to test limits, reimagine boundaries and even break them. We come to know a glitch at the moment of visual disruption in which the rules that govern it are made apparent because of their failure to connect or perform as coded; the glitch gives us clues into the underlying structure. The same is true for what artist Lauren Lee McCarthy calls social glitches, a theme she explores throughout her work in which she tests the ability of social rules to bend, unravel and break by her performance of the glitch.

In Lauren Human Intelligence Smart Home, for instance, McCarthy takes on the persona of a human home assistant, a human alternative to Siri and Alexa. “Alexa and Siri don’t care about you. I’m watching and anticipating and trying to figure out what is it that they need. I turn on the lights, run the faucet, bring a smile to their face, surprise them, make them feel something.” Unlike PAT, who was programmed to be a surrogate mother, McCarthy’s piece sees her become a surrogate virtual assistant, albeit one whose interface is coded with women’s features. While Siri and Alexa have been programmed to feature women’s voices and figures (racialized as white women) to provide users with a sense of usability, Lauren’s Human Intelligence Smart Home is a constant reminder to users that there is a real flesh and blood human woman on the other end of the system. In a series of videos, McCarthy captures interactions with Lauren users, including an elderly husband and wife. “I’m usually the one that does all these little extra things,” says Myriam, the wife. “So at first I was a little careful about asking her, but now I’m like how else am I supposed to live?”

These “little extra things“ as well as not-so-little feminized tasks required to reproduce the population on a daily and generational level (the work of social reproduction) often go invisibilized under the auspices of being labors of love, Lauren Human Intelligent Smart Home also offers insights into another type of invisibilized labor: the ghost work of humans in the loop. For instance, in the case of the real life actress who voiced Siri, Susan Barnett, the fact that her voice would be used for Apple’s virtual assistant Siri was a mystery even to her. All manner of automated services we use today, including artificial intelligence, can not function without a human worker at some point in the production process, even while they may be, like Barnett, unaware of their participation in the general intellect and collective if spatiotemporally dispersed labor process.

Lauren, the Human Intelligence Smart Home, tried to learn algorithmically, by absorbing information being fed to her by the user-client and trying to adapt her behaviors to the needs and desires of users. McCarthy wired her clients’ homes with devices to be able to control the temperature, lights but also reminded them to take their medication, and schedule their recurring haircut appointments. Taken to its logical conclusion, then, Lauren could even learn to preempt or predict their needs and desires not unlike other “intelligent” machines. At the same time, Lauren’s human-ness, her human “intelligence” and range of human emotions is always already imbued into the services provided. The idea for Lauren the system was inspired by McCarthy the person’s feelings of jealousy of the ways that “Alexa was granted instant intimacy. People will take her home and give her access to their lives.” Cheekily, McCarthy’s remarks “Anything Alexa can do I can do better.” Lauren allowed the real-life McCarthy to be always just out of the frame waiting for the moment to be useful, watching and waiting to be of service, idling between being reached for like a remote control that participants used to change the channel on the television.

Yet, putting a real human being at the other end of the arrangement also makes visible and tangible the friction behind technologies that give the impression of being seamless or free of conflict: virtual assistants who work 24/7 and never complain, real life smart houses wired through the Internet of Things (IoT), robots and artificial intelligence that obscure gendered, racialized and classed imaginaries.

McCarthy’s attunement to rules and social mores is something that she says comes naturally to her given her diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. The gravitational pull toward thinking about rules is at least partly responsible for her interest in coding and in projects like Lauren where takes on the persona of a learning machine. But as so-called smart machines and artificial intelligences proliferate our day to day lives, her performance of Lauren also raises important questions about how we measure intelligence, human agency, and ultimately power.

As the human companion to a 6 year old dog named Carmela, I have given a lot of thought to how intelligence is measured in non-human beings. One of the first things I learned, after an initial 10 months of consistent and repetitive training to get her to go potty outside, was that dogs have personalities acquired partially through generations of breeding and partly through something we call a personality or temperament. I happen to have a dog with a strong will to deliberately change her environment or course of events – a strong sense of agency. It’s the reason I find her so charming and sometimes frustrating. But the intelligence of dogs, much like smart technologies, are measured in terms of obedience or their ability to follow commands through which they were programmed. Intelligence in this sense is infallibility, a mechanical objectivity free from human error. Carmela will never be a “smart” dog in this sense, but I have come to respect her right to range, to glitch, to assert her agency.

Lauren’s human emotions, her jealousy of Alexa, her drive to do it better than Alexa, her desire to make clients feel something all contribute to her philosophical approach to care as a virtual assistant. Over time, her human drives may lead her to acquire and practice greater skills and a greater capacity to care both in terms of doing tasks and emotional bonding – something paid and unpaid care workers all around the world do every day.