Indian workers are filming their own jobs at $2.62 an hour to train the robots that will replace them

In New Delhi, women segregate plastic packaging with iPhones strapped to their foreheads, angled to capture every motion of their hands. The footage is not for supervision. It is training data, and what it is training is a machine to do their job.

What The Investigation Found

A Bloomberg investigation published this week documented thousands of workers across India being paid to film their own labour from a first-person perspective for robotics companies.

The work is precisely what it sounds like. Workers wear cameras — often ordinary iPhones strapped to the head — angled downward to catch the exact movements of their hands: flicking a blade to strip labels from plastic bags, stacking sacks for reprocessing, stitching shoes, welding steel. Robotics firms are competing to collect this footage.

The rate of pay is around $2.62 an hour.

Why This Data Is Valuable

The technical term is egocentric data — video captured from the perspective of the person performing a task rather than from an observing camera.

It matters because the hardest problem in robotics is not building a machine that can move. It is teaching that machine what a task actually involves: how much pressure to apply, at what angle, in what sequence, and how to adjust when the material behaves unexpectedly. That knowledge lives in the hands of people who do the work, and it is largely tacit — the workers themselves could not fully write it down.

First-person video captures it anyway. Feed enough of it into a model and the machine can begin to copy the motion. Which is why robotics companies are willing to pay for footage of tasks that, from the outside, look unremarkable.

The Consent Question

This is where the story turns from an economic observation into an ethical one.

According to the reporting, many workers were not clearly informed that the footage would be used to train automation systems targeting their own job categories. India's IT Ministry has reportedly raised questions about whether consent obtained in these arrangements is adequate.

The distinction matters. Data labelling — the established Indian outsourcing business of tagging images and text for AI training — involves workers processing someone else's data. This is different in kind. Here the workers are the data. Their movements, their bodies and their working environments are the raw material, and the specific purpose of collecting it is to reproduce their labour without them.

The Wider Context

India's position in the global AI economy has been built substantially on supplying labour to it — the data annotation, content moderation and IT services work that the technology requires.

That position is already under strain. The combined market capitalisation of TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Tech Mahindra has fallen more than 46 per cent since August 2024, as generative AI automates the coding and support work the industry was built to supply. Nearly 50,000 job cuts announced globally in 2026 have been explicitly attributed to AI.

What the Bloomberg reporting documents is the same dynamic arriving in physical labour, and arriving through a mechanism in which the workers themselves are the mechanism. The camera on the forehead is the transfer.

None of this makes the robotics work illegitimate — training data has to come from somewhere, and paid work is paid work. But at $2.62 an hour, with the purpose reportedly undisclosed, the terms of that exchange are worth stating plainly. Someone is being paid a few dollars an hour to hand over the one thing that made their labour valuable.