Indian workers film manual tasks to supply robot-training data

Recording work for robot training

Mohammed Ashim, 22, has cut hair and trimmed beards in Bengaluru for four years. Recently he began strapping a camera to his head to record his work; it captures only his hands and fingers, with clients' faces blurred. He wears it five or six hours a day.

His footage is collected by a local company and sold to technology firms and research organisations training physical AI, which can control robots in the real world. Rashdan Technologies co-founder and CEO Shahil Baig said clients request tasks including industrial work, agriculture, household chores, pottery, garment-making, embroidery and candle-making.

Pay, consent and competition

Baig said Rashdan pays $5 to $10 for eight to 10 hours of recorded work, that consent matters and that faces are blurred. He said clients now ask for four to six cameras around a person's head, which costs more because more is asked of workers.

Manish Agarwal, founder of Humyn Labs, said physical tasks require detailed signals of limb movement and force. His company, based in Bangalore and San Francisco, says it has 96,000 data collectors across Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Mohammed Arman, who has worked in textiles in Bangalore for 10 years, said he accepted camera work for extra money to send to family in Bihar. Teacher Jolly Arifur, in Guntakal, Anantapur, said she records domestic work around her teaching for two to three dollars an hour.

Job concerns and regulation

Agarwal said India's role is largely as a supplier of raw footage and argued it should move up the value chain by cleaning, structuring and validating data and setting quality standards.

Bino Paul, a senior professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, said it is too early to tell whether machines will replace these workers' jobs. He said workers may have little recourse if automation spreads and called for governments to regulate AI.