Unpaid Work in the AI Age by Diane Coyle
Unpaid work, such as dealing with government bureaucracy and private-sector administration, consumes a huge amount of people’s free time. While AI tools have the potential to change this, with important implications for the economy, predictions about AI’s impact tend to focus exclusively on paid work.
CAMBRIDGE—Discussions about how AI might disrupt the economy have a blind spot: they largely fail to account for the valuable activities people do outside of paid work. Statisticians call such activities “household production,” but they collect very little data about them. The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) is conducted annually in the United States, but its scale is small, and most OECD countries collect such information less frequently. As a result, there is very little economic research, and next to no policy debate, on how most of us spend most of our time.
