For workers with families, keeping private life off camera is a constant negotiation. Arjun, a father of two daughters, has to wrangle his chaotic two-year-old out of frame. “Sometimes it’s very difficult to work because my daughter is small,” he says.
Sasha, a banker turned data recorder in Nigeria, tiptoes around when she hangs her laundry outside in a shared residential compound so she won’t record her neighbors, who watch her in bewilderment.
“It’s going to take longer than people think.”
Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley
While the workers interviewed by MIT Technology Review understand that their data is being used to train robots, none of them know how exactly their data will be used, stored, and shared with third parties, including the robotics companies that Micro1 is selling the data to. For confidentiality reasons, says Ansari, Micro1 doesn’t name its clients or disclose to workers the specific nature of the projects they are contributing to.
“It is important that if workers are engaging in this, that they are informed by the companies themselves of the intention … where this kind of technology might go and how that might affect them longer term,” says Yasmine Kotturi, a professor of human-centered computing at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Occasionally, some workers say, they’ve seen other workers asking on the company Slack channel if the company could delete their data. Micro1 declined to comment on whether such data is deleted.
“People are opting into doing this,” says Ansari. “They could stop the work at any time.”
Hungry for data
With thousands of workers doing their chores differently in different homes, some roboticists wonder if the data collected from them is reliable enough to train robots safely.
“How we conduct our lives in our homes is not always right from a safety point of view,” says Aaron Prather, a roboticist at ASTM International. “If those folks are teaching those bad habits that could lead to an incident, then that’s not good data.” And the sheer volume of data being collected makes reviewing it for quality control challenging. But Ansari says the company rejects videos showing unsafe ways of performing a task, while clumsy movements can be useful to teach robots what not to do.