ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of AI digital assistants as surveillant data-gathering devices in the home that are marketed as ideal caregivers for modern home management. Using Alexa Together as one example, this chapter considers how the frame of caregiving may be leveraged to “smooth” people’s concerns about privacy and data gathering, while justifying intensified surveillance for elder adults and disabled family members as a function of market segmentation. The framing of surveillant technologies as caregivers both reflects and reproduces the extractive logics of algorithmic culture that transforms social relationships into opportunities for data gathering. This chapter argues that a key feature of AI urbanism is the access to intimate and personal data in the home as a resource that can be commoditized and integrated into urban governance and planning. These concepts are critical for theorizing the role of AI digital assistants within broader autonomous processes of urban living and governance associated with AI urbanism.
