Textile factory workers in India are teaching AI how to do their jobs : NPR

Laborers in Indian textile factories are filming themselves working so developers can train AI to take over their jobs.

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Some lawyers, accountants and computer coders are worried that AI will take over their jobs. Factory workers in India are concerned, too. They’ve been training the AI robots that will replace them. NPR’s Diaa Hadid reports from Karur in southern India.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Non-English language spoken).

DIAA HADID, BYLINE: Women thump down aprons they’re packaging into plastic as a radio warbles through their textile factory. Three men walk around, hand out GoPros to workers – including 40-year-old Shobha Kiribakaran (ph). It’s the third time Kiribakaran says she’s been told to don a GoPro.

SHOBHA KIRIBAKARAN: (Speaking Tamil).

HADID: But nobody’s ever told her that it’s recording her every hand gesture to train AI robots to do this job.

KIRIBAKARAN: (Speaking Tamil).

HADID: Kiribakaran says she’s worked here for 10 years. Six days a week, 9 to 6. Earns $90 a month.

KIRIBAKARAN: (Speaking Tamil).

HADID: She says, “I don’t know how to do anything else.” Scenes of workers wearing GoPros recording themselves working shook the Indian public in April, after a video went viral of textile workers sitting in rows, all recording themselves as they process fabric.

(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)

UNIDENTIFIED YOUTUBER: This is not a sci-fi plot.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: That is happening right now on factory floors across India.

UNIDENTIFIED YOUTUBER: Workers are training their own replacements.

HADID: That’s from Upskill Abhi’s YouTube channel and News9Live. And it appears India is emerging as one key place to record this kind of footage. And developers need millions of hours of it to train AI robots. Some workers are paid to hand over this data, but many others, like Kiribakaran, are just being ordered to do it.

ASTHA KAPOOR: We can just call it what it is, which is exploitation of labor.

HADID: Astha Kapoor is co-founder of the Aapti Institute. It studies the impact of technology on people. Labor experts worry about what it will mean for India if AI industrial robots take over workplaces here. Already, this country struggles to absorb the some 600 million people who make up India’s workforce.

AMIT BASOLE: I see these factory jobs as not good jobs. If robots take them over, I don’t necessarily shed tears for the job, but there is the question of what people are going to do.

HADID: Amit Basole is a professor of economics who looks at India’s labor market. He says the government here is not equipped to handle the shock waves of AI replacing workers.

BASOLE: We have a slow apparatus here. I’m not sure how well set up we are to do all that.

HADID: But others say AI robots are unlikely to be deployed at scale in India – in the near future at least – because they’re expensive, power-sucking machines in a country where power, at least, is costly. This is Kapoor of the Aapti Institute.

KAPOOR: We may be able to make the robots, but they’re bloody expensive to run, as we have understood that humans are cheaper to run than robots are.

HADID: And yet, AI robots are in the pipeline, even if they might not be deployed in India at first.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

HADID: On a Karur main street, music blares from a stalled rickshaw before a nondescript building. It’s where Objectways houses some of its labs. Employee Rajeshkumar Ramaswamy (ph) shows us another way robots are being trained to do industrial jobs.

(SOUNDBITE OF BEEP)

HADID: In a large room, young men with GoPro cameras strapped to their heads hold what look like grippy robot claws. One man uses the grippy claws to screw bottle lids off and on.

(SOUNDBITE OF ROBOTIC CLAWS CLACKING)

HADID: The bottles are on a desk. There’s big and small bottles, plastic, metallic. This is Ramaswamy.

RAJESHKUMAR RAMASWAMY: Robot need to learn what is the water bottle.

HADID: It’s to teach AI robots that all these different shapes are bottles because what these men are doing is showing a robot how to see for itself, how to do this job using its own grippy hands. Ramaswamy compares teaching an AI robot to raising a baby.

RAMASWAMY: The robot is like a child. It is a born child. So we need to teach which need to be done.

HADID: Back in the textile factory, Kannagi Periyasaamy (ph) is folding and packing aprons with a GoPro fastened to her head. She’s one of the few folks here who’ve been told why she’s wearing a headset. And she tells us she’s teaching a robot to do her job.

KANNAGI PERIYASAAMY: (Speaking Tamil).

HADID: And she says she’s certain that one day she’ll be replaced.

PERIYASAAMY: (Speaking Tamil).

HADID: When that happens, she says, I’ll go to my village and raise cows.

Diaa Hadid, NPR News, Karur, Tamil Nadu, India.

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