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Soon, Americans won't have to worry about buying clothes that come from overseas sweatshops, not because apparel manufacturing is suddenly coming back home, but because those clothes will be made by AI-guided robots. A factory in India has strapped cameras onto its workers with plans to use the footage to train AI to do the work.
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Factory workers are now going about their work with cameras strapped to their heads. The workers are being monitored, which quickly led to a decline in workplace happiness as conversations came to a halt, with workers knowing they were being recorded. But the real goal isn't to stifle workers or keep track of them, but to get rid of them entirely. Their work will be automated and these workers will be out of a job.
That's only part of it, however. The factory is no longer just selling clothes; it is selling its workers' movements to tech companies for AI training. Tech companies are able to get contracts with factories to obtain footage they need to train their AI, meaning that the workers are doing two jobs while still only being paid for one.
"South Asia remains the workshop of the world for many labour-intensive industries. If you’re trying to teach a robot how humans work, there are few places that offer the same combination of scale, diversity, and density of human labour as India. On any given day, millions of workers are sewing garments, assembling products, sorting goods and performing tasks that robotics companies want machines to learn," said Labellerr AI founder Puneet Jindal.
This new enterprise is part of the data annotation market, where firms contract to get the footage, then clean it up, and get it to tech companies to train their AI, after which the workers in not only apparel but many areas will be made obsolete. I wonder if something like this could come to America, in construction, for example, or if American workers would say "no" to doing two jobs for the price of one.
Indian manufacturers don't see a need to compensate workers extra for the training material since the workers are still doing their same jobs, only now with cameras on their heads. It seems to me that the workers' knowledge and skill are being taken from them without extra pay—they're not just doing their jobs, they are giving away their ability to do their jobs.
It doesn't seem fair to me. This is the kind of thing labor unions should be able to organize against, but likely they are too busy backing communists and advocating for public sector workers to worry about the actual workers of the world.
Libby