DomesticAI: AI’s Potential to transform unpaid domestic work in the UK and Japan

Overview

The Future of Unpaid Work is a major research project that will scope the AI technologies’ potential to free up time now locked into unpaid housework and care work and how willing we are to introduce these technologies into our private lives. The findings will also point out emerging vulnerabilities associated with outsourcing tasks long carried out within the privacy of our homes to smart technology.
Significant efforts are directed at understanding the implications of new technologies for the future of employment and training. In contrast, the future of unpaid domestic work has received little attention so far. This project is to study how the advances in technology development and particularly increasing equipment of households with smart gadgets will influence household production in the coming years. It will estimate automatibility, affordability and social acceptability of relying on technology to replace or assist individuals with housework and care work in Japan and the UK. Based on these estimates the project will consider several likely scenarios on the way domestic workload will change in the coming years and the implications of the likely changes for a number of social issues, such as gender inequality and aging.