Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / Figure Is Paying People in 108 Countries to Film Their Own Chores, So Its Robots Can Learn to Do Them

Transcript

Figure Is Paying People in 108 Countries to Film Their Own Chores, So Its Robots Can Learn to Do Them · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the chores are the curriculum. Figure announced on August twenty-fifth that it has launched an app called Index, which pays people to film themselves doing housework.
• 0:12
  [Guest] Folding clothes, setting a table, emptying the trash. Figure says two hundred sixty-four thousand downloads across a hundred and eight countries, sixteen million videos uploaded, and fifteen million dollars already paid to the people doing the filming.
• 0:26
  [Host] Fifteen million dollars for housework. What is Figure actually buying?
• 0:29
  [Guest] Demonstrations. The footage trains Helix, the model behind Figure's newest humanoid, the machine doing parts work at BMW's plant in South Carolina. Figure says it tried buying this data from outside suppliers and couldn't get the scale or the variety.
• 0:44
  [Host] What does one video pay?
• 0:45
  [Guest] Figure won't say. Fifteen million dollars over sixteen million videos averages about ninety-four cents, but that's arithmetic on their own two numbers, not a published rate.
• 0:55
  [Host] Ninety-four cents to fold a shirt. That's clickwork with your hands.
• 0:59
  [Guest] Careful. Forbes called it a gig marketplace on Wednesday, and the fair comparison is what else is on the table. A lot of those hundred and eight countries have no gig economy at all.
• 1:11
  [Host] It's still a company paying you to train the machine built to do your job.
• 1:17
  [Guest] Yes, and until now that was the unpaid version. The developers who taught coding assistants what good software looks like were paying a monthly subscription while they did it. There's a piece on unscarcity dot ai called The Tool That Trains Its Replacement about exactly that loop.
• 1:34
  [Host] Alright, that lands. Getting paid beats paying.
• 1:36
  [Guest] And it's real. Free on both app stores, your own phone, no interview, no shift, nobody watching the clock. If you were going to tidy the room anyway, the extra cost is holding the phone.
• 1:49
  [Host] So what would I make in an evening?
• 1:52
  [Guest] Unknown, and that's what I'd want in writing first. The only public rate for this kind of work came in March, when TechSpot reported a different firm paying around eighty dollars for two hours of usable footage.
• 2:05
  [Host] Usable is doing a lot of work there.
• 2:08
  [Guest] It is. You're paid for what passes review, not for the hour you spent recording.
• 2:13
  [Host] Why does Figure need forty-four thousand strangers? Hire fifty people and film them properly.
• 2:18
  [Guest] Because fifty people fold laundry fifty similar ways. Figure's own pitch is the spread. Per thousand hours it logs three hundred seventy-three different tasks, eleven hundred different objects, a hundred and sixteen different rooms.
• 2:31
  [Host] So the weirdness is the product.
• 2:33
  [Guest] Your unusual kitchen is worth more to them than your competence. Averaged guesses only beat individual ones when the errors point in different directions, and that holds for a mop stroke as much as a stock pick.
• 2:46
  [Host] Then the weirdness runs out. Once they have every kind of kitchen, mine is worth nothing.
• 2:52
  [Guest] That's the asymmetry, and it isn't really the wage. Ninety-four cents is paid once. The video keeps working every time they retrain the model.
• 3:01
  [Host] And fifteen million against the billion dollars Figure says it'll spend on data and compute this year isn't profit-sharing.
• 3:08
  [Guest] It's a purchase. Not a bad one for any single evening. Just a permanent one.
• 3:13
  [Host] In Unscarcity, Patrick Deglon argues that in the old economy value comes from whatever is rare, and what's rare right now is a human body doing an ordinary thing in a room no lab has ever seen. Figure just posted the price, and it clears the same night.
• 3:30
  [Guest] For more on tools that train their replacements, and why a crowd of strangers beats a room of experts, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.