Workers at Indian factories are wearing head-mounted cameras — and every movement they make is recorded to train humanoid robots. Companies like Cobot Intelligence pay workers $3–5 per day to wear motion-capture gear: cameras, hand sensors, and body trackers.
The data is used to train neural networks that control robotic manipulators. The goal is to teach robots to replicate human movements: assembly, sorting, packaging.
The reaction online is blunt: "people are literally training the robots that will replace them." It's essentially a new form of cheap labor — not physical, but dataset labor. Workers generate training data without realizing they're training their own replacements.
Similar setups exist in China and Southeast Asia, but India became the first country where this was documented at scale.