Does more AI mean fewer chores?
Technological advances are changing the nature of work as we know it. Over the next few decades, jobs such as cashiers and taxi drivers will disappear, making way for new ones. But what does the future hold for unpaid domestic work and the time we spend on it? To answer this question, researchers supported by the EU-funded projects FAMSIZEMATTERS and GenTime asked 65 AI experts from Japan and the United Kingdom (UK) to estimate how automatable housework and child and elder care tasks are. Their findings are published in the open-access journal ‘PLOS ONE’. The experts predicted that 39 % of the time we currently spend on domestic tasks could be automated within the next 10 years. “The estimates varied significantly between tasks,” write the authors. “The most automatable task was seen to be grocery shopping, of which 59 percent was considered automatable within ten years; the least automatable task was physical childcare, at 21 percent. In general, care work was predicted to be more difficult to automate, with an average estimate of 28 percent in ten years, while housework was seen as more readily automatable, at 44 percent.” Interestingly, the reasons most experts cited for why care work was more difficult to automate were not technical in nature. Instead, they spoke about how socially acceptable it was to delegate childcare to machines, how it affected a child’s development and its privacy implications. They also noted that it is household budgets that determine the kinds of technologies that are developed and marketed, since most manual tasks are automatable. The “real bottleneck,” according to one expert, is the “cost of that automation.”
Different countries, different views
Although there was overall agreement between the British and Japanese AI experts on which tasks were more or less likely to be automated, variations did exist, and these were to some extent linked to their backgrounds. Japan and the UK might be similarly advanced industrialised countries today, but they have rather different technological and economic histories. A higher percentage of UK-based experts (42 %) believed that automation might replace more household labour in 10 years compared to Japanese experts (36 %). According to the authors, this might be because “in the UK, technology is associated more with labour replacement.” This divergence between countries was also apparent in the predictions between male and female experts. While in the overall sample they did not differ significantly from each other, a closer look at each country painted a different picture. “In the UK, male experts were significantly more optimistic about technological potentials than were female experts, which is in line with the finding that men tend to be more optimistic about technology in general. Yet in Japan, the situation was opposite: male experts were less optimistic than females.” The authors cite Japan’s stark gender disparities as a possible reason for this, since Japanese professionals usually have almost no personal experience of domestic chores that are usually left to their wives. FAMSIZEMATTERS (Family size matters: How low fertility affects the (re)production of social inequalities) and GenTime (Temporal structures of gender inequalities in Asian and Western welfare regimes) are both hosted by the University of Oxford. The forecasts made with the two projects’ support not only anticipate the future of unpaid work, they can also play a role in shaping it. For more information, please see: FAMSIZEMATTERS project web page GenTime project website
Keywords
FAMSIZEMATTERS, GenTime, domestic work, unpaid domestic work, childcare, elder care, automation, work
