"Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Domestic Work" (Nobuko Nagase seminar)
By Sophie Welsh
Prof. Nobuko Nagase’s seminar examined the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to domestic work, which is a pressing issue for Japan due to its labor shortage and aging society.
One of the characteristics of Japan’s labor market has been the significant gender-based wage gap, which is further stratified by educational level (high school versus college education). In recent years, the employment rate for Japan’s female university graduates has been rising, but the gender wage gap has persisted. To reduce the opportunity costs of forming a family, increasing male involvement in household work and female participation in the labor market are important goals for the Japanese government.
A recent report has found that 47 percent of UK jobs and 49 percent of Japanese jobs are potentially automatable in the near future. Prof. Nagase’s collaborative project with Japanese and UK researchers tackled the question of the future of domestic work in the coming years, specifically regarding the proportion of work that will be automatable at two points in time: 5 years and 10 years in the future. They looked at the differences in predictions offered by academics, R&D professionals, and businesspeople, as well as differences in response by the respondents’ gender and country (Japan versus UK).
Overall, the respondents predicted that 27 percent of household tasks will be automatable in 5 years, and 39 percent of them in 10 years. When broken down further, the data showed variations by country, gender, and composition of work. For female respondents, there was not much of a difference by country. However, responses were quite different for male respondents, with predictions from Japan being lower than those from the UK.
By breaking down the regression to find the cause of this trend, the researchers found that male R&D professionals in Japan collectively offered a very low prediction regarding the automation of domestic work. Prof. Nagase offered possible reasons, including a tendency for Japanese males to delegate domestic work to their wives due to long hours at work; Japanese domestic work activities being more complex due to smaller housing and variety of foods; and technological differences between the countries.
Prof. Nagase and her collaborators also conducted a consumer survey on whether the respondents would want to use robots for household cooking and cleaning, given certain tradeoffs regarding the husband’s and wife’s work hours and pay, and costs to hire a robot or a human to help at home. They found that acceptance of robots was higher for certain tasks, and not many liked the idea of hiring a human at their homes. Female respondents showed more willingness to use robots than males and were more likely to hire robots or let their spouses do the job.
The Q&A session discussed the regression results, research methods, and the studies’ future implications. One participant commented that the data seem to indicate that women are more sensitive to their spouses’ efficiency in household tasks. Another topic of discussion was how household work would affect marriage and divorce rates in different national contexts.