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According to experts, robots will do 39% of housework by 2033.
Experts predict that within a decade, around 39 percent of the time spent on domestic chores such as housework and caring for loved ones could be automated, with another 27 percent automated within five years.
According to the BBC, researchers from the United Kingdom and Japan asked 65 artificial intelligence (AI) experts to forecast the amount of automation in common household tasks in the next ten years.
Experts predicted that grocery shopping would be the most automated while caring for the young and old would be the least affected by AI.
The findings were published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Researchers from the United Kingdom and Japan polled 65 artificial intelligence (AI) experts to forecast the level of automation in common household tasks in the next ten years. They predicted that the majority of people will rely on AI to shop for groceries and the least on AI to care for young children or the elderly.
Robots “for domestic household tasks,” such as robot vacuum cleaners, “have become the most widely produced and sold robots in the world,” according to researchers from Oxford and Japan’s Ochanomizu University. They wanted to know how robots would affect unpaid domestic work: “If robots take our jobs, will they at least take out the trash for us?” they wondered.
The team polled 29 UK AI experts and 36 Japanese AI experts for their predictions on home robots.
Researchers discovered that male UK experts were more optimistic about domestic automation than their female counterparts, whereas the situation was reversed in Japan.
“The most automatable task was seen to be grocery shopping, with 59 percent considered automatable within ten years; the least automatable task was physical childcare, with 21 percent,” the study discovered.
“In general, care work was predicted to be more difficult to automate, with an average estimate of 28% in ten years, while housework was seen as more easily automatable, at 44%.”
The differences between task types correspond to experts’ belief that “routine” work is more susceptible to automation than “nonroutine” work. Furthermore, complex problem-solving and communication appear to be especially resistant to automation.
When experts were asked why care work was more difficult for AI to execute, they said that the task focuses on social interaction and the challenges are not technical in nature – something that AI can grasp more easily.
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