With a smartphone strapped to her head, Nagireddy Sriramyachandra records herself cutting mangoes in her kitchen in India, helping train artificial intelligence (AI)-driven robots for future household tasks.
By earning slightly more than $US2 (HK$15) per hour for her footage, she produces everyday videos that are essential for technology companies around the world as they teach machines to mimic human movements in real-life situations.
The 25-year-old is one of a growing army of thousands of AI system trainers in the world’s most populous country.
“I may get a robot myself in the future,” said Sriramyachandra from her kitchen in Chennai in southern India’s Tamil Nadu state.
AI chatbots and image generators crunch reams of digital data, but building systems to navigate real-life environments is more challenging.
Developers think feeding first-person footage, called “egocentric data”, into specialised AI models will help robots copy humans.
Some AI trainers work at home, others in factories or specialised studios – using video glasses, head-mounted cameras and motion sensors.
“It blares ‘hands not detected’ when I’m not recording properly,” said Sriramyachandra, who sends recordings via a special app to the AI data company Objectways.
The firm, which has offices in India and the United States, lists Fortune 500 multinationals as clients. It works with Amazon SageMaker, a platform for machine learning models.
Humanoid robot revolution
The humanoid robot market is booming, with investment bank Morgan Stanley predicting that over a billion could be in use by 2050, mostly for industrial and commercial purposes.
“Folding clothes, coffee making ... cooking a very specific thing, sandwich making,” said Objectways head Ravi Shankar, listing videos requested by clients.
“Some jobs are supposed to be taken over, so humans can go and do better things.”
In India, the emerging field of spatial AI is providing new employment – for now.
The 50-year-old CEO is US-based but hires workers from Tamil Nadu, where he grew up and where it is one of India’s international technology hubs.
India has positioned itself as a global middleman for the creation, processing and annotation of AI data.
“It’s likely that these data collection services will increase,” said digital labour expert Aditi Surie, from the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bengaluru.
Blooming AI dilemma
India is aggressively developing its AI industry, but its leaders are aware that, alongside the technology’s much-hyped benefits, automation poses risks.
Government think-tank Niti Aayog said that most discussions around AI and labour “focus on white-collar professionals and predict an almost certain loss of jobs in the segment” without urgent action.
“Little attention, if any, is paid to how AI can serve India’s 490 million informal workers, the very people who form the backbone of our economy,” it said in a report released ahead of a global AI summit in India this year.
The think-tank has examined how the technology could help or harm dozens of professions – from cobblers to sewer cleaners, farmers to tea sellers.
For the last decade, 55-year-old Ponni has sat on a roadside in Bengaluru, the city known as India’s Silicon Valley, making flower garlands.
She, too, has been paid to have a phone strapped to her forehead.
“The next generation ... who might have to do work similar to mine – they will face a problem,” Ponni said.
Always wearing a camera
At an Objectways studio, AI system trainers film themselves performing household tasks in fake, fully furnished flat rooms.
After several thousand hours of filming, the wallpaper is changed to provide clients with variety.
“Today I sit here, tomorrow I stand there,” said engineering graduate Rani N, 21, on a break from filming herself, once again, folding a towel.
Each video lasts about four minutes, and she records around 90 a day – on nearly every conceivable spot on the bed.
She said the job is “tolerable”, but feels like she is always wearing a camera.
In other rooms, colleagues arranged pencil sharpeners, water bottles and crayons in patterns, recording with depth-sensor cameras.
Qanat Consulting Services in Andhra Pradesh, an Objectways subcontractor, supplies recordings to about a dozen large data firms.
Some of its 2,000 contributors perform tasks with motion-sensor bands on their “wrists, hands and legs”, CEO Thaslim Pattan said.
Manish Agarwal of Bengaluru-based Humyn Labs, unrelated to Objectways, records conversations and videos.
Contributors discuss assigned topics – ranging from politics to entertainment – for clients wanting to process speech patterns.
Agarwal denies that robots will steal jobs, believing that networks of humans and robots “will work together” one day, he said.
“A welder in India could be managing a welder-robot in Prague,” he said.
