ABSTRACT
Currently, there is much discussion about the likely impact of automation and artificial intelligence on the world of work. This discourse mostly ignores the way this impact will affect the home. This derives from a blind spot of contemporary economics, which is the way it valorises paid employment at the expense of unpaid work, which mostly takes place within the home and is what turns a residence into a home. This dominant approach also ignores the temporal nature of human experience and identity and the ways in which, because of that, the home and the work that takes place within it fit into the rest of economic life. Putting the home at the centre of thinking about automation and its impact generates a range of new questions and leads to conclusions (however tentative) that would otherwise not be reached.
