39% of the time currently spent, mostly by women, on (unpaid) household work may be automated within the next decade, according to estimates by artificial intelligence experts from Britain and Japan.

The job par excellence that can be automated to a significant extent is said to be shopping at the supermarket, while childcare is considered the most difficult to automate.

The researchers, led by Ekaterina Hertog of the University of Oxford, who made the relevant scientific publication in the journal “PLoS One”, asked 29 British artificial intelligence experts and 36 Japanese (of both sexes) to assess to what extent it is possible to have automated within the next decade 17 jobs and “chores” of the house, which are necessary for a household and a family.

The prediction is that an average of 39% of the time people currently spend on any household task could be done by or through “smart” machines within the next ten years, with UK analysts believing that automation will replace more human labor (42%) versus the Japanese (36%).

The estimated rate of automation varies by job, from 59% for shopping to 21% for childcare.

Male experts from Britain tend to be more optimistic than women about the possibility of home automation, which is in line with the general trend that previous studies have shown that men are generally more optimistic about technology than women.

Conversely, in Japan, female specialists appear slightly more optimistic than men, perhaps because in Japanese households there is a greater inequality in the distribution of work between the two sexes.

Previous research has shown that people aged 15-64 spend about 43% of all their working and study time on unpaid household chores, such as cooking, cleaning, caring for children and/or the elderly, etc.

In Britain, men spend about half as much time on such jobs as women, while in Japan only 18%, hence the clearly greater inequality in Japanese households, and thus the expectation of female experts in the land of the rising sun that automation will be the “machine god” that will redeem them.