Enthusiasm for the smart kitchen also betrays a belief that automation automatically saves time, regardless of the context. The idea of a kitchen run by super-intelligent machines, like Herb the robot butler, is not radical at all. As we saw in chapter 5, there are limits to how smart a kitchen can be if the home is conceived in terms akin to a rational, orderly, wellfunctioning machine. Time is treated as a highly individualized activity rather than as an aspect of shared, socially organized activities that are themselves shaped both by institutions and physical infrastructures. A far more inventive design frame would think outside the kitchen box. It would see beyond the private single-family household to encompass diferent social arrangements. If the aim were to economize on housework time, it could reorganize the sexual division of domestic labor. It might even collectivize housework in the way envisioned by American feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the late nineteenth century.39
The problem is that ultra high-tech conceptions of conserving personal time have ramifications. They materially shape not only our machines but also our cultural frames, tropes, and metaphors for understanding ourselves. How can we possibly refuse the ensemble of objects that define our world as given, if we are constantly narrated as subjects who are programmed, “hard-wired,” or coded to process information in particular ways? As Lucy Suchman has shown, grand projects in humanoid robotics and artificial intelligence perversely limit the potential for altering our cultural imaginaries of the human. They make it much more dificult to locate “the conditions for action and possibilities for intervention in the specificities of mundane sociomaterial assemblages.”40
Chapter seven
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