Thousands of India Workers Are Helping AI Firms Train Robots to Replace Them

Workers Are Teaching AI-Powered Robots to Take Over Their Jobs Robotics companies are competing to collect videos of humans stitching shoes and welding steel to give their machines new skills. Sunita Rathore sits atop a mountain of plastic waste in Karan Vihar, a recycling colony on New Delhi’s western fringe, where open sewers skirt alleyways too narrow for two cars to pass. Dressed in a flowery sari and green glass bangles, the 43-year-old has spent years sorting and cleaning discarded plastic for about 20,000 rupees ($211) a month. Today she’s also wearing something unusual. It’s an iPhone strapped to her head, angled to catch every motion of her hands: the flick of a blade stripping labels off plastic bags, the stacking of sacks bound for reprocessing by grade. She leans forward constantly, keeping her legs out of frame and shuts off the camera if anyone calls out to her. Capturing faces is forbidden. Rathore has no idea what the footage is for or that her work is critical to the future of artificial intelligence and robotics. What she does know is that wearing the device earns her an extra 150 rupees an hour, and that for the first time in two decades of work, she’s saving money for her four children’s schooling.