My cleaning crew was late. When they arrived—a 20-year-old and a 21-year-old, both sweaty, in matching white, branded collared shirts—they were armed only with Clorox wipes and gusto. But I couldn’t complain: They were about to spend two hours scrubbing my Brooklyn apartment for free. The lunch that a private chef showed up to make me while the cleaners wiped down my windows and vacuumed the rugs (branzino, with saffron orzo, sugar snap peas, English peas, roasted tomato, capellini onions, and asparagus) was also gratis. The catch? The two cleaners and the chef all wore baseball hats with cameras attached to record their every move, with the footage then sent to an AI lab which would analyze the “egocentric human data”—of an arm mopping a floor, or flipping a filet of white fish—to train robots so that, one day, they can do those tasks for us.
“Don’t worry if you see the camera pointed at you,” one of the cleaners told me. “Your face will get blurred out.” So began an afternoon spent in the future.
My temporary staffers came courtesy of a platform called Shift, an online marketplace set up by MicroAGI, which is based in Germany. It works like this: Users get free services; the humans who provide those services get paid by shift—around $30 bucks an hour, I’m told—and absolutely everything gets recorded. Users can also sign up to wear a headpiece to surveil themselves doing physical tasks—like planting a garden, or washing dishes. MicroAGI then takes the videos, which it says offer valuable data for future AI systems, and sells them to a third party, or keeps them for itself. It’s not the only company doing this. Luel, Kled, and Waffle Video all offer to pay people to record themselves doing their everyday tasks.
“Our job is to figure out how to deploy robots at mass scale using human footage,” Bercan Kilic, a co-founder of MicroAGI, told me. For him, the name of the game is volume, and variety. “All we care about is diversity,” he said: “diversity of settings, diversity of lighting, diversity of objects, diversity of hand, hand size, gloves—all of these things.”
