I Spent a Week Recording Myself Doing Chores for Money. Who’s the Robot Now?

I admit it, AI—and our complicity with it—continues to surprise me. For Wired, Reece Rogers recounts how he spent a week with an iPhone strapped to his forehead, recording himself doing mundane chores around the house, such as making a salad, pouring drinks, and tying his shoes, all in a bid to train the forthcoming generation of humanoid robots on how to do human tasks. Welcome to the latest iteration of the gig economy, where you sell your motor skills to what’s known as egocentric data collectors for pennies.

I am no longer a mere human being. I am a conduit of reality, a medium of messages. I hold a knife in my hand and slice into an organic cucumber, hunching so the iPhone strapped to my forehead can capture all 10 fingers. I throw the slices into a salad bowl and end the recording. Somewhere, a baby robot is a tiny bit smarter.

During my tests, Luel felt a little clunkier than Kled in its design. The platform doesn’t divvy up jobs by chore type; it simply has a Record Any Hands-On Activity From a First-Person Perspective listing that offers $6.60 for an hour of video. (For comparison, the federal minimum wage in the US is $7.25 an hour.) Luel’s requirements are hyperspecific—head-mounted only, wide-angle camera turned horizontally, minimum 1080p resolution, visible hands 95 percent of the time.

I restrapped my phone to my head and got to work in the kitchen, scrubbing plates and loading the dishwasher. I submitted a five-minute video to Luel’s website; a day later it was rejected. “Your hands were not visible in enough frames,” read Luel’s explanation.