Paid to show robots how to live

Folding laundry, slicing a mango, making a sandwich: these everyday gestures have become a commodity. To train their humanoids, robotics companies need thousands of hours of video filmed “in the first person”. So they pay people to film themselves doing their household chores.

In Los Angeles, Instawork offers about $80 for two hours of usable footage. In India, workers film their days with a smartphone strapped to their forehead for about 250 rupees an hour, barely $3. Scale AI has reportedly already gathered more than 100,000 hours of footage.

If your future home robot folds T-shirts nicely, it may owe it to a stranger who folded their own in front of a camera.