Tired of cooking, cleaning and other household chores? Robot servants are coming

Tidying the house, shopping for food, walking the dog, preparing dinner, even caring for loved ones. What would your day be like if you didn’t have to do most or all of these?

Make, er, room for assistive technology and smart automation. One thing’s for sure – these robots won’t be leaving a mess behind!Researchers from the United Kingdom’s University of Oxford and Japan’s Ochanomizu University asked 65 AI experts in both countries to predict the effect of robots on household chores by 2033. Specifically, 29 male and female AI experts from the United Kingdom and 36 from Japan assessed to what degree 17 housework and care tasks might be automated. “If robots will take our jobs, will they at least also take out the trash for us?” the authors stated in a paper published in the journal ‘PLoS ONE’.

“Our research suggests, on average, around 39% of our time spent on doing domestic work can be automated, the degree of automation varies very much across different types of work,” corresponding author Lulu Shi, postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute and lecturer at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education, explained in a news release. “Only 28% of care work, including activities such as teaching your child, accompanying your child, or taking care of an elderly family member, was predicted to be automated. Yet 44% of housework, including cooking, cleaning, and shopping, was thought to be automatable.”It’s not the first time we hear that robots will free us from domestic duties. There’s scepticism. Co-author Ekaterina Hertog, associate professor of AI and society at the University of Oxford, draws a parallel between robots and another anticipated technology for the ‘BBC’. “The promise of self-driving cars, being on the streets, replacing taxis, has been there, I think, for decades now – and yet, we haven’t been able quite to make robots function well, or these self-driving cars navigate the unpredictable environment of our streets. Homes are similar in that sense.”

Are we ready to share our homes with smart technology that will replace – I mean assist – us? “I don’t think that we as a society are prepared to manage that wholesale onslaught on privacy,” commented Prof. Hertog.