{"id":20461,"date":"2026-04-01T11:27:32","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T11:27:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/01\/humanoid-data-training-gig-economy-2026-breakthrough-technology\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T11:27:32","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T11:27:32","slug":"humanoid-data-training-gig-economy-2026-breakthrough-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/01\/humanoid-data-training-gig-economy-2026-breakthrough-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"The gig workers who are training humanoid robots at home"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When Zeus, a medical student living in a hilltop city in central Nigeria, returns to his studio apartment from a long day at the hospital, he turns on his ring light, straps his iPhone to his forehead, and starts recording himself. He raises his hands in front of him like a sleepwalker and puts a sheet on his bed. He moves slowly and carefully to make sure his hands stay within the camera frame.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Zeus is a data recorder for Micro1, a US company based in Palo Alto, California that collects real-world data to sell to robotics companies. As companies like Tesla, Figure AI, and Agility Robotics race to build humanoids<\/a>\u2014robots designed to resemble and move like humans in factories and homes\u2014videos recorded by gig workers like Zeus are becoming the hottest new way to train them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Micro1 has hired thousands of contract workers in more than 50 countries, including India, Nigeria, and Argentina, where swathes of tech-savvy young people are looking for jobs. They\u2019re mounting iPhones on their heads and recording themselves folding laundry, washing dishes, and cooking. The job pays well by local standards and is boosting local economies, but it raises thorny questions around privacy and informed consent. And the work can be challenging at times\u2014and weird.<\/p>\n

Zeus found the job in November, when people started talking about it everywhere on LinkedIn and YouTube. \u201cThis would be a real nice opportunity to set a mark and give data that will be used to train robots in the future,\u201d he thought.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Zeus is paid $15 an hour, which is good income in Nigeria\u2019s strained economy with high unemployment rates. But as a bright-eyed student dreaming of becoming a doctor, he finds ironing his clothes for hours every day boring.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI really [do] not like it so much,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m the kind of person that requires \u2026 a technical job that requires me to think.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Zeus, and all the workers interviewed by MIT Technology Review<\/em>, asked to be referred to only by pseudonyms because they were not authorized to talk about their work.<\/p>\n

Humanoid robots are notoriously hard to build because manipulating physical objects is a difficult skill to master. But the rise of large language models underlying chatbots like ChatGPT has inspired a paradigm shift in robotics. Just as large language models learned to generate words by being trained on vast troves of text scraped from the internet, many researchers believe that humanoid robots can learn to interact with the world by being trained on massive amounts of movement data.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Editor\u2019s note: In a recent poll, MIT Technology Review readers selected humanoid robots as the 11th breakthrough for our 2026 list of <\/em>10 Breakthrough Technologies<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n