For most of human history, economic production and household life occupied the same place. Families sourced and prepared food, made clothing, practiced trades, taught children, and cared for relatives as part of a shared household economy. Home was where economic life happened. Only recent history makes this seem like an odd statement.
The Agrarian era enabled larger settlements, diverse markets, and more complicated divisions of labor, but the household remained a center of production. The Industrial Revolution pulled the two apart. Higher-wage work moved into factories and, later, offices. Children left for schools. Caregiving, education, and social welfare became increasingly specialized or were taken up by the state instead of being responsibilities for the family and local community.
Industrialization made the world richer, healthier, and better educated. But it also atomized family life. In the countries where industrialization delivered its greatest benefits, it became normal for parents and children to scatter every morning, spend nearly all their waking hours apart, and reconvene for an evening meal, if schedules allowed, before going to sleep and doing it all over again.
The best incomes, education, and resources a family needed were somewhere outside the home. Family members had to leave home to get them. Western social structures are built around this. The suburbs were created for a commuter class. Schools and daycares are built for moms and dads who are out of the house from 9 to 5.
Digital technology has changed that physical fact for millions of people. A growing share of economic activity can now happen wherever there is a computer and a reliable internet connection. The result is a modern version of the household economy, one that retains the prosperity and specialization of industrial society while giving families greater control over where their lives take place.
Artificial intelligence is now widening that opening. It does not just move existing office work onto a dining-room table; it reduces work that once required a building full of specialists, and it puts more capability back into a household.
We have experienced this ourselves. We both work in public policy, and we can do most of our work from home. Although we travel, attend face-to-face meetings, and spend time in offices to do our jobs well, we don’t need to be outside the home from 9 to 5 every day.
This shift is especially meaningful to us.
A few weeks after our first child was born, Rachel was diagnosed with a rare spinal cord tumor. The tumor and the surgery to remove it left her a quadriplegic. Suddenly, ordinary parts of life required far more planning. A trip across town could involve accessible transportation, building entrances, elevators, bathrooms, and the possibility that any one of them would fail.
Remote work removes these obstacles.
Rachel leads organizations, writes, speaks, builds coalitions, and participates in national policy debates without first completing an accessibility obstacle course. Taylor can pursue his own career while remaining present for the unpredictable demands of family life. We now have three young children, two careers, and a household that functions because technology gives us room to arrange those pieces ourselves.
On Instagram, accounts of two working parents who homeschool multiple children throughout the day are growing, reflecting a shift in the household’s economic center.
AI has made that more practical. It drafts, summarizes, captions, and organizes. It turns voice into text and a pile of documents into something a person can act on. For parents, it takes some of the mental load. “The Cut” profiled Jesse Genet, a mom with a team of AI agents that assist her with the daily work of homeschooling a family of seven.
We’ve used it this way. When one of our boys had a tick behind his ear, we could get a first read on the risks while we waited for the pediatrician. We have used it to plan a Cub Scout hike and to generate practice problems when a child is struggling with a question. Let’s be clear, this does not replace a doctor, a scout leader, or a parent. It means the household does not have to wait on an institution for every next step, and it multiplies our capacity.
The Industrial Revolution organized family schedules and geography around centralized production. Digital technology gives employers and workers more room to experiment. It makes being present at home possible. Some companies will decide they operate better in person. Others will be fully distributed. Most will probably land somewhere in between, and those decisions will change as technologies, jobs, and individual circumstances change. The opportunities of family unit entrepreneurship are diverse and growing.
We should let them.
For generations, we became accustomed to thinking of home as the place where economic life stopped. Serious work happened elsewhere. That division now feels natural, although it was created by a particular period of technological development and is historically unusual.
We have no interest in recreating a romantic version of the preindustrial household. That world included grinding poverty, limited opportunity, and rigid social roles. We do think it is possible to keep the abundance of modern life while recovering some of what industrialization weakened: the household as an active center of work, care, education, and community.
The U.S. reached its lowest fertility rate ever this year: just under 1.6 births per woman, below population-replacement levels and below what many women report as their desired number of children. This revolution could help address this alarming problem. For many women, having children can feel like an impossible tradeoff between economic security and stepping away from the workforce, even temporarily. Imagine a future where our culture and public policy embrace the flexibility technology makes possible — so moms and dads no longer have to choose between meaningful work and meaningful time at home, but can do both.
For a long time, earning a living usually meant leaving home. Digital technology, and the AI now layered on top of it, means fewer families have to accept that separation as the price of economic participation. The economy is coming home. We should give families the freedom to decide what to do with it.
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Taylor Barkley is the Director of Federal Government Affairs and Policy Advisor at the Abundance Institute. Rachel Barkley is the Director of Able Americans. They are parents of three children.
