on February 22, 2023, confirms our worst fears. Or does it? A team led by Ekaterina Hertog, an Associate Professor of AI and Society at the University of Oxford, and colleagues in Japan, conducted a survey and found that 39 percent of the time is currently being spent on unpaid domestic work.Automation could reduce time spent on housework and care work tasks by 39 percent
Though working-age men spend only half as much time as working women on the same work, only a handful of studies have examined automation concerning unpaid domestic work, or how predictions about automation really differ depending on the AI experts consulted,Twenty-nine male and female AI experts from the UK and 36 experts from Japan were asked to estimate how"Our study with technology experts in the UK and Japan find that in 10 years’ time domestic automation could reduce the amount of...
The experts predicted the most automatable task to be grocery shopping , and the least automatable task to be physical childcare .And, UK-based experts believed that automation might replace more domestic labor than Japanese experts .
Female experts in Japan were slightly more optimistic and the authors think it could be attributed to the Japanese gender disparity in households. The authors caution that the study's diverse sample does not statistically represent the field and is too small to generalize the findings to all AI experts.The future of work has become a prominent topic for research and policy debate. However, the debate has focused entirely on paid work, even though people in industrialized countries on average spend comparable amounts of time on unpaid work.