From Twin Tub to Trolley Tech Pt 1 of 3

When help feels like failure — and what that might teach us about AI

I once met a lady who I greatly admired for her strength, her tenacity and her voice. She had raised a large family, and what stays with me is not only what she was capable of herself, but the strength and capability she instilled in her children. She was the kind of person whose influence travelled beyond the things she did. It lived on in the people she had helped to shape.

There is a story about her that I have heard anecdotally within the extended family. I cannot know exactly what she felt, what words she used, or even how accurately the story has been carried through the years. I do not want to put feelings or language into her mouth. What interests me is the idea at the heart of the story, because it feels unexpectedly relevant now.

She had a lot of children and, as women of her generation routinely did, she washed clothes by hand. Then her husband bought her a twin-tub washing machine.

From his point of view, it was an act of care. Here was a woman doing an enormous amount of physical work for a large family. Technology could make one part of that work easier. Why would you not want to give somebody you loved that help?

Yet the story I heard was that the machine did not initially feel entirely like help. Somehow, it touched a sense of whether she was doing a good enough job. The very thing intended to reduce her burden may also have carried an uncomfortable suggestion: if the machine needed to do this for her, had she not done a good enough job? Had she somehow failed in this task? Was she somehow less capable?

Again, I cannot know the detail of her private experience. I can, however, recognise the feeling.

When help becomes a judgement

There is something deeply human in the possibility that assistance can make us question our adequacy. We can become so used to measuring ourselves through effort that removing the effort feels as though it removes part of the achievement.

If I can do this myself, perhaps I should. If somebody — or something — helps me, does that mean I was not good enough? Am I taking a shortcut? Am I becoming lazy?

Those questions sound remarkably familiar in current conversations about artificial intelligence. People are not only asking whether AI is accurate, ethical or safe. They are also asking much more personal questions. If AI helps me write, is it still my writing? If it organises my thoughts, have I cheated? If it can complete in minutes something that would have taken me hours, should I have spent the hours anyway? If I use the help available to me, does the result somehow count less?

Perhaps we are living through our own twin-tub moment. The technology arrives offering to carry some of the labour. Instead of only asking what freedom that could create, part of us asks what accepting the help says about us.

Then the extraordinary becomes ordinary

The interesting thing about the washing machine is what happened next. It became normal.

Today, most of us would not attach moral virtue to scrubbing a family's clothes by hand. We would not look at somebody loading a washing machine and think they ought to make more effort. It is simply a tool performing work we no longer believe requires a human being to prove anything.

What once represented a dramatic shift in domestic labour is now so ordinary that we complain about having to put the washing on. The task that would once have consumed hours of physical effort has been reduced to sorting, loading, adding detergent and pressing a button, yet even that can feel like a chore.

While I was thinking about this, somebody commented on one of my posts: “If only AI could do my ironing for me.”

Of course. The washing has been conquered. Now what about the ironing?

Yesterday's luxury becomes today's baseline. Once one burden disappears, our attention moves to the next one.

We have been doing this for centuries

The washing machine is one small example of a much larger human story. Across generations, we have used knowledge, technology and social change to reduce the amount of human life consumed by basic survival and repetitive labour.

Our progress is real. Machines perform domestic labour that once swallowed hours. Food can arrive without us growing, hunting or preserving it ourselves. Information that once required a journey to a library can appear in seconds. In historical terms, many of us are living amid extraordinary abundance.

That deserves celebrating. It also creates an uncomfortable question.

Where are we now?

We have more convenience, more choice and more access than previous generations could have imagined. Yet we have also become remarkably skilled at creating new forms of not-enough: not enough time, money, success, productivity, experiences, possessions, followers or progress.

We remove one demand and create another. We save time and fill it. We increase capacity and then turn that capacity into expectation. Somewhere along the way, productivity can stop being a tool and become a master.

From twin tub to trolley tech

Which brings me to a supermarket trolley.

AI-powered smart trolleys are currently being trialled at Morrisons in Preston. They can recognise products as they are placed inside, weigh fresh produce, display a running total, connect with a loyalty card, highlight promotions and make product recommendations.

Think about where this could go.

Imagine I could tell the technology about me: my dietary requirements, foods I enjoy, my budget, meals I am planning and perhaps even health goals I have chosen for myself.

It could help me find suitable foods, suggest alternatives or remind me about something I have forgotten. Perhaps one day it could effectively say: You told me what matters to you. Would you like some help making that easier?

Now we are back at the twin tub.

The technology does not have to decide what I want. I do. Its value could be in reducing some of the unnecessary work between deciding and doing.

The interesting thing about friction

That word — friction — matters.

Every additional decision, label we need to decipher, product we cannot find, calculation and moment of trying to remember what we need while navigating thousands of products adds cognitive load.

Not every inconvenience creates harmful stress, and the biology is far too complex to claim a simple line from friction to cortisol to hunger. Yet stress is not simply something that exists in our thoughts. Our bodies respond too.

A study published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism examined 63 healthy adults following acute psychosocial stress, measuring cortisol, perceived hunger and cholecystokinin (CCK), a hormone involved in satiety. The researchers themselves emphasised that the endocrine mechanisms underlying eating after stress are “not fully understood”, while their findings demonstrated a relationship between cortisol stress reactivity and perceived hunger.

For me, the important point is not that we can reduce something as complex as eating behaviour to cortisol. We cannot.

It is that the choices we make around food are being made by a human being responding to an environment, not by a brain operating independently of one.

So imagine technology that reduces some unnecessary friction, not to make the decision for us, but to make the decision we have already made easier to carry out.

That interests me far more than whether an AI trolley can save me three minutes at the checkout.

The real opportunity may be the space

This is where the conversation becomes much more interesting than productivity.

If AI can perform in minutes some of the work that previously consumed hours, the obvious question is how much more we can produce. Businesses will ask it. Individuals will ask it. We are conditioned to ask it.

There is another question available: what will we do with the hours?

What if some of the gain were allowed to remain a gain? What if technology gave us more time to think rather than simply more time to produce? More time with people. More space for creativity. Better conversations. Rest. Learning. Movement. Contribution. Proper attention. The kind of things that need judgement, lived experience, relationship and care.

Freedom does not automatically appear when labour disappears. We have to choose what happens to the space. Otherwise we may build astonishing machines to save us time and then become even more convinced that we never have enough of it.

Where are we trying to get to?

Perhaps that is the question underneath all of this.

If every technological development removes a burden and we immediately replace it with another expectation, when do we arrive? If every increase in productivity simply raises the amount we believe we should produce, what would enough ever look like?

Perhaps progress needs two measures. One is what technology enables us to do. The other is what it enables us no longer to have to do.

The second measure matters because human life is finite. Time saved is not merely unused capacity waiting to be monetised. It is life returned.

The woman with the twin tub did not need to prove her strength by continuing to scrub every item of clothing by hand. Her strength was already evident in the life she had lived, the family she had raised, the voice she had used and the capabilities she had instilled in her children.

The machine could take the washing. It could not take any of that away.

AI can take some of the processing. It can carry some of the repetitive work. Perhaps it can even make navigating the supermarket easier.

The question is whether we experience that as a threat to our worth — or as an invitation to spend more of ourselves on the things for which our humanity really is required.

There is, however, another question about that trolley that I have deliberately avoided.

If technology becomes clever enough to understand what I like, what I buy and what I might want next…

who is it working for?

Me?

Or the person who wants to sell me something?

That is where I am going next.