Automation is a key part of modern business strategy, but the rise of AI has accelerated automation to a level where no job feels safe, regardless of how talented or skilled someone is. People doing physical work seemed to be more relaxed about the risk of robots taking their jobs, but if the latest theories floating on the internet are to be believed, those jobs may not be safe either.
Earlier this month, clips of manual workers in an Indian garment factory started going viral online. They showed human workers operating sewing machines, but there was one thing off about them – they were all wearing head-mounted cameras.
Although no news outlet has been able to confirm it, the main theory regarding these head-mounted cameras is that they are designed to record the worker’s movements so that companies can use the footage to train AI-powered robots that will eventually replace them.
“First step, make humans work like robots, second step, make humans teach robots how to work like robots, third step, fire all humans and get robots to work,” one person wrote on X.
“They are digging their own graves,” someone else commented.
Since the cameras capture exactly what the worker sees — including hand movements, coordination, and task execution — it creates a rich dataset for machines to learn from,” India Today speculates. “Instead of relying on expensive motion-capture tools, companies could use this “human-eye view” to teach robots how to perform complex actions by simply observing and copying.”
Apart from the concerns regarding job losses on a massive scale, some have argued that, if the theory proves true, the way companies are going about it may have ethical implications, as many of the workers probably have no idea they are essentially rendering themselves obsolete.
