The publication of Federico Pistono’s book, Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That’s OK, back in 2012 spawned a thousand think pieces, news headlines, and debates over what the future of robotics means for humans and the workplace.

At a recent Future of Ageing Conference held by the think tank International Longevity Centre (ILC) in London, the topic was once again up for debate. Whilst the consensus is that the robots are coming, in fact many argue they’re already here, Caroline Waters, vice chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and vice president of Carers UK, made an interesting point in regards to the robotic effect on the labour market.

“We’re conflating robots and AI with industry,” said Waters. “Actually we’re more likely to use domestic robots.” She backed up her statement with a statistic the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) made back in 2016: there will be 31 million robots helping households across the world by 2019.

Get ready for it, next year’s big tech trend will be domestic robots. Here's why that's a really good thing...

What role will domestic robots play in our homes?

When we think of a domestic robot, we may imagine an Iron Man, Jarvis-esque AI carrying out all our chores. However, your home may have robots in it already, particularly if you own a smart speaker like Google Home or Amazon Alexa.

“If you want to be really specific about the definition of the robot being a machine that helps you complete a series of tasks," explains futurologist Dave Coplin, CEO of The Envisioners, "then my washing machine in the kitchen is a robot that’s been in our house for the past few decades,”

However, IFR predicts this area of robotics is set to explode with more people buying service robots to help them with particular chores, with companies including Amazon reportedly working on mobile robots to cash in.

Coplin has spent the past 30 years in tech, including 12 years at Microsoft, and calls himself a pragmatic optimist. Essentially, he believes robots can be a positive force in our lives if done the right way.

He takes offence when it comes to pop culture and the depiction of robots. “We’ve been taught that robots are supposed to be our slaves. There was a play in the 1920s where robots were slaves and at the end of the play there were so many robots, they got bored and took over so they became the humans,” he explains.

Instead of this dystopian vision, Coplin thinks the potential for domestic robots is huge. “The opportunity in the domestic context is neither be a slave nor a master, but to be a companion and peer to the family.”

Recently, he collaborated with robotics company Anki, which makes the cute Pixar-inspired robots Vector and Cosmo, to explore the British public’s attitudes to domestic robots. This companion idea was one of the findings from the survey: 16 per cent of respondents said they were hopeful robots could offer companionship, by either listening to their problems or helping keep their pets company when they were away.

“For me, the opportunity is that people get the utility value of domestic robots. What we’ve got to do is take them on a journey so they can see the emotional and social value,” says Coplin.

The emotional and social value of domestic robots

Coplin is throwing his futurist weight behind social robotics, the genre of robotics trying to imbue emotion into communication between humans and robots. Anki is doing this with its Vector robots, MIT Media Lab start-up Affectiva is doing it by developing tech to read human facial expressions, and Dr Madeline Gannon is doing it at her lab in Pittsburgh.

In particular, Dr Gannon’s work focuses on the idea that teaching robots to be more human means they will work better alongside us.

Coplin agrees with this: “We need to get this right because when you get the communication right between humans and a machine, the efficiency of what they’re able to do goes through the roof,” he says.

We know AI technologies are getting better, including computer vision and natural language processing, all key capabilities for robots to function. But, Coplin says the power of these devices also depends on the data they have access to. Unlike industrial robots, whose insights are based on structured factory floors, domestic robots have to contend with the chaos of domestic life.

“Every home is different, laid out in different ways and it changes every now and again. For a poor robot, it's quite tricky to navigate,” he explains.

There are also concerns around giving a robot access to the information it needs to be helpful in the home. “If you want a domestic robot in your home, it needs to access a lot of personal, private data in your home to work well. What kind of regulation should we have for that data?” asks Coplin. To deal with this, he believes companies and governments need to work together to create the right kind of regulations, that will ensure humans benefit from the intelligence of robots in their homes but feel their private data is protected.

Once these issues are solved though, the potential for help from robots is enormous.

At the ILC conference, Waters said robots will have an emancipatory effect on humans. “We should pose the question in a different way: when will we finally be able to relinquish the burden of work to AI and robots, so we can focus our problem solving on things that matter?,” she asked.

In the Anki survey, it appears the British public is on board with the time-saving domestic robots could offer, with respondents imagining they could get two hours a day back with the help of a robot. Around 38 per cent said they wanted to use that time to have richer relationships with people inside the home, whilst 30 per cent said they would use the time for hobbies.

“It’s a counter-intuitive point to what people were expecting – you think these robots are going to disrupt us but actually they could enable us to become more human,” says Coplin. “If that’s what we choose to do.”