China is employing armies of human ‘cyber laborers’ to train humanoid robots

China is trying to address a key bottleneck in its national push for embodied artificial intelligence by employing human laborers to train humanoid robots.

Local governments have reportedly established dozens of “robot training centers” as part of a concerted effort to generate much-needed movement data for autonomous humanoid machines.

In an exclusive report, Rest of World paints a rather bleak picture of what goes on inside these facilities, including one that’s operated by a Shanghai-based robotics startup. The company reportedly employs hundreds of young workers as “cyber-laborers,” who spend their days wearing virtual reality headsets and exoskeletons while engaging in repetitive tasks such as folding clothes, opening and closing the door of a microwave and stacking blocks, hundreds of times. These movements are captured in granular detail and compiled into movement data sets that can then be used to train humanoid robots to perform household chores and manual labor.

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