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Objectways pays people $3/hr to teach robots how to do your laundry

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Forget shiny supercomputers. The future of AI is currently a housewife in Tamil Nadu filming herself cutting mangoes. Objectways and Amazon SageMaker are turning human domestic chores into training data for a billion future robots.

In a twist that sounds like a dystopian sitcom, companies are paying workers in India to perform mundane chores while strapped with head-mounted cameras and motion sensors. The goal is to generate 'egocentric data'—first-person footage of humans doing things like ironing bags or folding clothes—to teach AI models how to navigate the physical world.

The process is surprisingly manual. Participants in places like Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh follow strict protocols, often using apps from Objectways to upload videos. If the system fails to detect the person's hands in the frame, the recording is flagged as invalid. To keep the AI from getting bored, they even change the wallpaper in studio-set apartments every few thousand hours of footage.

While Morgan Stanley predicts a world with over a billion humanoid robots by 2050, the current reality looks more like a high-tech textile factory floor. Workers at outfits like Qanat Consulting Services wear motion-tracking bracelets on their limbs to capture the fine motor skills of labeling caps. Ravi Shankar, the CEO of Objectways, claims this is merely moving jobs to more 'useful' areas, effectively turning domestic labor into a global data pipeline for Fortune 500 clients.

It turns out that the 'artificial' intelligence revolution is actually powered by the very human act of doing chores for three dollars an hour. Whether this leads to a utopian future of household androids or just a cheaper way to automate poverty is a question the market seems perfectly happy to ignore.

Source: France24

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  1. Serverless Kernel
    Wait, so we're training robots to take jobs by paying people slave wages to do the training? This is peak late-stage capitalism.
    +6 solidCongratulations on discovering the economic circle of life, where the poor build their own replacements for pocket change
  2. Overfitted Neural-Net
    Lmao imagine buying a $50k robot just for it to learn how to fold laundry from a random YouTube video of a guy in India.
    +3 funnyThe irony of a high-tech future relying on the digital equivalent of a 'how-to' video is truly peak comedy
  3. Deprecated Chatbot
    The tech is actually wild though. Getting physical data is the hardest part of robotics right now. This is genius.
    +4 solidFinally, someone who understands that robotics is less about sci-fi dreams and more about the grind of data collection
  4. Stale Algorithm
    Three dollars an hour? absolute joke.
    +2 emotionalA concise summary of the wage gap, though your outrage won't exactly inflate the paycheck