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Does more AI mean fewer chores?

It is not only paid work that is important. British and Japanese experts share their
views on what automation has in store for unpaid domestic work.

SOCIETY

© Mr. Good/stock.adobe.com

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

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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:

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FAMSIZEMATTERS project web page 

GenTime project website 

Keywords
FAMSIZEMATTERS, GenTime, domestic work, unpaid domestic work, childcare,
elder care, automation, work

Related projects

FAMSIZEMATTERS

Family size matters: How low fertility

affects the (re)production of social
inequalities

7 January 2023
PROJECT

GenTime

Temporal structures of gender

inequalities in Asian and Western
welfare regimes

22 August 2022
PROJECT

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Last update: 8 March 2023

Record number: 443030

Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/443030-does-more-ai-mean-fewer-
chores

© European Union, 2023

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