2022.Nov.28

REPORTS

Report on the Lecture by Dr. Lulu Shi “The Future(s) of Unpaid Work: How Susceptible Do Experts from Different Backgrounds Think the Domestic Sphere Is to Automation?”

The B’AI Global Forum held a lecture by Dr. Lulu Shi entitled “The Future(s) of Unpaid Work: How Susceptible Do Experts from Different Backgrounds Think the Domestic Sphere Is to Automation?” which was supported by the Institute for AI and Beyond, The University of Tokyo, on October 17, 2022. Dr. Lulu Shi is a sociologist and is working on the project DomesticAI as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford. DomesticAI is a collaboration project between the University of Oxford and Japanese universities and research institutions. The goal of this project is to understand how technology can transform unpaid domestic work. Unpaid domestic work includes housework, such as cooking, cleaning, and washing clothes, as well as care work, such as childcare and caring for elderly people.

The prediction of future technologies is likely to differ depending on the position of the person making the prediction: country, gender, field of expertise. To forecast the extent of automation of domestic work, the project applies the Delphi method. The sample is 65 respondents in total, with 36 in Japan and 19 in the UK from the field of expertise such as academics, R&D people, and business.

According to the survey results, the expert panel estimated that on average 39% of the time people currently spend on a given unpaid domestic work task could be automated within the next ten years and 27% could be automated within five years. As for divergent visions between countries and genders, in the UK, male experts were significantly more optimistic about the potential of domestic automation than female experts. But in Japan, the situation was opposite. The male experts in Japan were less optimistic than the female experts. Finally, when comparing experts from different professional communities, it turns out that experts from academic and business backgrounds were on average more optimistic about the potential of domestic automation than experts from R&D backgrounds.

To summarize the findings from this survey, 27% of unpaid domestic work is predicted to be automated in the next five years and, furthermore, 39% in the next ten years. And these predictions are to vary from country to country and from background to background, such as gender and field of expertise of the experts. Dr. Shi summarizes that their main contribution is to add unpaid domestic work to the literature of work automation.

In the Q&A session that followed the lecture, regarding the question of the implication of “automation” in this field, Dr. Shi said that she does not say that it is good or bad and depends on how we use it. Regarding the question of whether there are two-way interactions between countries and the fields of expertise, she said that they could not find super significance. And as for the reasons for selecting Japan and the UK for the survey, she answered that the two countries are similar in some degrees; they both are democratic countries and highly advanced in technology; on the other hand, they are also different in other aspects such as culture, how people think about unpaid work and labor market composition.