How AI will cook your food and clean your home with Professor Ekaterina Hertog

As AI progresses faster than we could have ever imagined, Professor Ekaterina Hertog explores how it can assist in our everyday chores.

New research suggests that AI will save us up to 40% of the time we spend on household tasks within a decade. Ekaterina Hertog, professor in AI and society at Oxford University, explores how the future of domestic chores will include AI.

Carla Buzasi, CEO at WGSN, hosts this podcast as the pair explore the pros and cons of AI assisting in house chores, from creating gender-equality to questioning how much of our data will have to be compromised.

Data will enhance the lever of AI service

"A vacuum cleaning robot really shouldn't need to know too much about us to just go around and suck the rubbish up from the floor. On the other hand, a cooking robot would probably need to know health conditions, allergies, food intolerances and probably everyone's preferences and from that kind of information, they probably can infer possibly even the number of household members and certain food quirks will be associated with certain age groups."

Breaking household gender inequality

"They have the potential to change the gender dynamics in the household. If we look broadly at my and other people's research on domestic division of labour, there's a lot of evidence that domestic housework and care work are not shared equally at all anywhere in the world. If these technologies are taking over some of our jobs, but not transforming the nature of the task, then we can imagine that women also benefit most because they are the ones who are doing more of it. So more of that time should be saved."

New industries are born

"Imagine laundry, I could just throw all my dirty laundry into one big basket, put it outside my door and there could be a human courier or a drone picking it all up, bringing it into a local factory-like setting where everyone's washing is brought in. And then there's huge economies of scale where this can all be cleaned up sorted and then a drone or a human courier is bringing it back to me."

Head to Apple or Spotify to hear the full discussion on our Lives of Tomorrow podcast episode, How AI Will Cook Your Food and Clean Your Home.