MANILA, Philippines — The discussion of artificial intelligence (AI) and robots taking over human jobs has reached another point following a recent study revolving around unpaid domestic help.
A study conducted by over 60 AI experts in the United Kingdom and Japan and released on the journal PLOS ONE set out to find how automable 17 house and care work tasks can be.
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Results showed that 39% of the time spent on a domestic task "will be automatable within 10 years." Robot vacuum cleaners "have become the most widely produced and sold robots in the world" even goes one of the study's observations.
The task most likely to see automation is grocery shopping — cutting it down by almost 60%, regular shopping was down by 50% — while the least likely is caring for young children and senior citizens.
"Only 28% of care work, including activities such as teaching your child, accompanying your child, or taking care of an older family member, is predicted to be automate," said one of the researchers, Dr. Lulu Shi, from the University of Oxford's Internet Institute.
Domestic tasks that saw an over 40% chance of being automated by the next decade included household cleaning, washing dishes, cooking, ironing and folding clothes, and doing laundry.
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The study also found that Japanese male experts were pessimistic about the potentials of domestic automation, which the researches interpreted through gender disparities in Japanese household. Opposite findings were found in British male experts who were more optimistic.
In relation to that, another AI expert from Oxford who worked on the study, Ekaterina Hertog, noted that more automated help could help improve gender equality as women still bear the burden of the majority of unpaid domestic work.
Hertog also said society should be more aware of such issues regarding domestic work and automation, "I don't think that we as a society are prepared to manage that wholesale onslaught on privacy."
US-Brazilian researcher and leading AI guru Ben Goertzel recently said at the Web Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil last week that AI could replace 80% of human jobs in the coming years.
A survey conducted by the Department of Labor and Employment and the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) in 2019 found there were 1.4 million domestic workers in the Philippines, with 83% of the grand total not covered by social security benefits. 36% of over a million live-in domestic workers work seven days a week without the benefit of a rest day, the survey also found.
Meanwhile, 2021 data from the PSA found that almost 800,000 of 1.83 million overseas Filipino workers are engaged in elementary occupations (domestic work), more than twice than those working in service and sales, and a majority of that number are women although many still remain undocumented.
Data released by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas showed that money coursed through banks by overseas Filipinos inched up 3.5% year-on-year to $2.76 billion (almost P154 billion) in January 2023.
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