Strange New Gig Work: Film Yourself Doing Chores

It's a weird gig in the age of AI: Companies will pay you up to $25 an hour to fold your own laundry, wash your own dishes, or cook your own meals. The catch, as both the Washington Post and the MIT Technology Review explain, is that you have strap a camera (or phone) on your head and record your hands in action. The footage then gets sold to robotics companies in the hope that their AI-powered robots will someday be able to perform these same tasks for us humans.

The scope is worldwide. MIT talks to a medical student in Nigeria who makes $15 an hour filming himself doing laundry and such for the US company Microl, which is based in California and collects real-world data for robotics firms. DoorDash is another new entrant to the video-gathering field, notes the Post. The bet is that robots will improve the way chatbots did—by gorging on data.

"It's going to take a long time to get there," says Ken Goldberg of the University of California, Berkeley. Teaching a robot to move its fingers in just the right way is an enormously complicated task, and he says humanoid robots may need more data than AI chatbots. When asked how long it will be until robots start doing our laundry, he responded, "Maybe in two years, three, five, 10, 20. Or longer."