Say hello to AI-roning! Almost 40% of time spent on household chores will be automated by 2033, experts claim

Having a never-ending list of household chores is something we could all do without. 

But relief is in sight, as experts say we could be spending 39 per cent less time on these tiresome tasks in 10 years. 

That’s because many household chores will be automated, according to a study led by the University of Oxford. 

Grocery shopping is the task predicted to see the largest reduction in human input, with 59 per cent of the effort handed over to algorithms and robots.

But when it comes to physical childcare, humans will still take on most of the responsibility, with tech predicted to take over just 20 per cent of jobs.

Experts say that we could be spending 39 per cent less time on household chores in ten years, because so many of them will be automated (stock image)

Previous research has shown that Brits use about 43 per cent of the total time they spend working and studying on unpaid labour, which includes household tasks as well as caring for children or the elderly.

Plus, a study last year revealed that women in the UK do 70 minutes more housework each day than men.

The gender imbalance is even more pronounced in Japan, as 18 per cent of working-age men spend around half as much time on housework than working-age women, compared to 50 per cent in the UK.

For the new study, published today in PLOS ONE, researchers asked 65 AI experts from the UK and Japan to estimate the extent to which everyday tasks will be automated in five and 10 years time. 

They claimed that the time we spend doing housework will decrease by 44 per cent over the next ten years, thanks to AI.

While grocery shopping came out on top, robots are predicted to take on a lion’s share of the chores inside the house 

They will reduce the amount of time we spend washing dishes by 47 per cent, as well as cleaning the house and cooking meals by 46 per cent, according to the experts. 

And it’s good news if you hate laundry day, as experts predict that AI will also be able to automate 43 per cent of the clothes washing process, and even reduce the time it takes to dry and fold it all up by 44 per cent.

‘[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.’

In contrast, care work tasks were seen to be less automatable than housework tasks, with time spent doing them predicted to reduce by 28 per cent in the same period. 

This difference was not pinned to technological limitations, rather lack of demand for it due to the negative social implications of replacing care work with robots.

These include the ‘social acceptability of delegating childcare to machines’, its ‘developmental impacts on the child’ and its ‘privacy implications’.

Robots that do domestic chores, like the Roomba vacuum cleaner, have become the most widely produced and sold robots in the world (stock image)

Many different robots capable of performing tasks related to elderly care have already been developed, and tested in Japan and the UK. Pictured: A robot that has notified a care worker that an elderly person has fallen 

This is despite the boom in educational technologies since the COVID pandemic resulted in school closures.

Indeed, many different robots capable of performing tasks related to elderly care have already been developed and tested in Japan and the UK.

The study authors also aimed to see whether the gender identity of the experts played a part in their predictions. 

Male experts from the UK were more optimistic about the level of automation that could be achieved with domestic labour than the female.

However, the opposite was the case for the Japanese experts, which the study authors say could be reflective of the ‘stark gender disparities’ in labour division in the country.

The authors hope the findings will help to shape the future of work.

‘We sought to offer a modest corrective to the lack of attention afforded to unpaid domestic work in analyses of work and labour,’ they concluded. 

‘This matters today, because immense resources, private and public, are being directed towards trying to manage the future of work.’