Life may soon feel like “The Jetsons.”
The days of spending all your time completing chores around the house might soon be over, according to a study published Wednesday in PLOS One. Researchers from the University of Oxford suggest that by 2033, many household chores will be automated, decreasing the average amount of time we spend on “a domestic task” by 39%.
Researchers asked 65 artificial intelligence experts from the UK and Japan to predict the degree to which everyday tasks will become automated in five years and in within the decade.
The time spent doing housework will decrease by 44% over the next 10 years, they said, with time spent washing dishes decreasing by 47% and cleaning and cooking by 46%.
Experts also estimated that laundry will be 43% automated, and the time it takes to fold laundry will decrease by 44%.
The task that is predicted to be most taken over by automation is grocery shopping, with 59% of the burden being put on robots and algorithms.
“[AI] could free up additional hours from people’s lives for paid work and leisure, especially for women,” the authors wrote. “It could in principle reduce the demand for domestic and care workers in aging societies like the UK and especially Japan and conversely diminish opportunities for migrant workers from other lower-income countries.”
But humans will still have most of the responsibilities of child care, with AI helping to reduce time by just 28% — mainly due to lack of demand, considering the negative social implications the hand-off would point to, such as the “social acceptability of delegating childcare to machines,” its “developmental impacts on the child” and “privacy implications.”
The demand for such technologies remains low even despite the boost in technological education during the school closures from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study also found that the experts’ gender identity played a part in how they expected AI to look in the future.
Male experts in the UK were more optimistic about the automation of everyday chores than females, but in Japan, female experts had higher expectations.
Authors believe this difference could be a reflection of the “stark genre disparities” in labor division in the country.
“We sought to offer a modest corrective to the lack of attention afforded to unpaid domestic work in analyses of work and labor,” the authors wrote. “This matters today, because immense resources, private and public, are being directed towards trying to manage the future of work.”