You Can Get Paid to Train Future Humanoids—If You're Prepared for the Consequences

Bored at work?

Life feeling emptier than usual?

Interested in preparing the ground

for robots to potentially replace you?

Hi, Reece Rogers and you, like me,

can earn literally tens of dollars

by recording first person videos to train humanoids to

scrub dishes, fold laundry,

pour drinks,

and slice organic cucumbers

after signing up for three platforms,

Kled, Luel,

and Waffle Video.

I performed data collection from the comfort of my apartment

for a full week,

making sure the iPhones strapped to my forehead

could capture all 10 of my fingers.

The videos help companies building robots

improve their AI models.

These paper specific clips known as egocentric data

can be critical for fine tuning machines

to excel at real world tasks

and are in such high demand

that some investors estimate

leading companies will purchase hundreds

of millions of hours from third party suppliers

over the next few years.

Egocentric data collection is already blooming

among gig workers in countries like India.

Avi Patel, the 22-year-old founder of Kled,

which says it has over 300,000 users worldwide,

told me that he wants every person on the planet

to be recording themselves doing the dishes.

The top earner on Kled, Patel says,

is a truck driver earning 8,000 a month

by sharing his dashcam footage

and submitting pictures of potholes.

As for my efforts across all platforms,

I earned the princely sum of $21.55 cents

from a week of filming household chores

and uploading more than 100 videos.

On the plus side,

my apartment has never been this clean,

and somewhere a baby robot is a tiny bit smarter.