NEW DELHI — There is a moment, late in every job, when you realize you have started training your replacement. India’s factories have simply dispensed with the awkwardness. As reported by NPR this week, factory workers across the country are strapping action cameras to their heads and filming themselves doing their jobs — packing, sorting, screwing, folding — so that the footage can be fed to robots, which will study the recordings the way students used to study masters: closely, reverently, and with the ultimate goal of taking the master’s chair.
The videos are not what you’d expect. The workers don’t just work; they work for the camera, holding and manipulating grippy plastic robot claws, narrating their own hands, performing the ancient human labor of showing a machine how to do human labor. One worker described the routine as “teaching my hand to my hand’s student.” He said it while wearing the camera. He said it for the camera.
The robotics industry calls this “demonstration data,” which is the phrase engineers use for watching someone else do the thing you intend to charge them for doing. Humanoid-robot companies have discovered that the hard part of automation was never the muscle. It’s the thousand tiny judgment calls — the way a packer rotates a box before it fits, the half-second a worker waits for the machine to settle. All of that judgment is currently being recorded at hourly wages and uploaded to the cloud, where it is becoming, at industrial scale, the résumé of the thing that is reading it.
The companies are sincere about this, which is the reassuring part. They genuinely believe the footage will create robots that move like the workers, work like the workers, and — this part they mention less, but it’s in every business plan — don’t ask for the Diwali bonus. The workers are equally sincere: several told reporters the cameras meant their jobs were “safe for now,” a phrase whose grammar deserves its own study. “For now” is doing heroic work in that sentence. It is load-bearing. It is holding up a family.
Whether the robots actually learn remains an open question that the industry answers the way all industries answer hard questions: with a bigger demo. In the meantime, the footage keeps coming — millions of hours of human competence, filmed from the only angle that has ever mattered, which is the worker’s own, looking down at hands that are, for a few more months, still the ones doing the job.