Today, sweatshop workers across the Global South are being made to pull double duty: both stitching clothes together, and training robots to put themselves out of work entirely.
New reporting by the Guardian documented this emerging gig taking hold at manufacturing facilities around the world. Outside Delhi, a 32-year-old garment maker identified as Lalita says her factory now requires everyone to strap a GoPro camera to their heads at the start of each shift. “We found it funny at first, because of how we all looked with that headgear,” Lalita told the Guardian. Yet as cameras started to dominate the shop floor, workers became more wary that their every word would be picked up by the boss, she explains, resulting in a much quieter, more paranoid workplace.
“The way people mount a CCTV camera on a wall, they mounted one on us,” she added.
And as their bosses recorded terabytes of footage on them, the workers say they were never told what the cameras were ultimately for. While they had the side-effect of enforcing discipline by keeping workers focused and fearful, the cameras were actually there to hoover up footage to train humanoid robots.
Training humanoid robots works by feeding a vision-language-action AI model thousands of hours of footage of humans performing tasks. After ingesting it all, this neural network learns to predict and mimic the sequence of body motions and hand positions needed to achieve an intended result — like sewing buttons onto a jacket — that it can later reproduce in the real world.
As the case of Lalita’s factory shows, these “human-footage-for-robots” operations serve to concentrate the wealth and data generated by this labor into the hands of a few robotics firms and their manufacturing partners. Meanwhile, the job of generating training data is done by low-paid, precarious workers who now serve as a dual revenue stream for the owners of the factory.
The end goal, for the tech firms and factory owners at least, is a one-size-fits-all robot, which can ostensibly plug-in to any assembly line and make workers like Lalita obsolete. If there’s any silver lining, it’s that we’re a long way off from humanoid robots ever becoming a viable replacement on the factory floor — but it’s telling that the world’s elites are broadcasting their intentions regardless.
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