Source: Bloomberg (paywall)
Indian workers are monetizing their labor twice over—once performing tasks, again by having their movements captured and fed into robot training datasets. This is the actual infrastructure behind "synthetic data" claims: not simulation or annotation farms, but real humans in precarious positions selling biometric and behavioral data at minimal cost. The model works only in labor markets where wage arbitrage is extreme. The economic viability depends entirely on India's low wages and weak data protections, which means as automation advances, the workers generating the training data have the least job security of anyone in the chain.