Factories Attach Cameras to Workers Hoping of Replace Them With Robots

R.Satish BABU / AFP via Getty Images

Across the Global South, some garment workers are now being asked to do more than make clothes—they’re also helping train the robots that could one day replace them.

According to reporting by The Guardian, an emerging practice at manufacturing facilities involves requiring workers to wear GoPro cameras throughout their shifts. At a garment factory outside Delhi, a 32-year-old worker identified as Lalita said employees were instructed to strap cameras to their heads each morning before beginning work.

“We found it funny at first, because of how we all looked with that headgear,” Lalita told The Guardian. But as the cameras became a permanent fixture on the factory floor, workers grew increasingly uneasy. Many believed their conversations were being recorded, creating a quieter, more anxious workplace where employees felt constantly watched.

“The way people mount a CCTV camera on a wall, they mounted one on us,” she said.

Workers say they were never told why the footage was being collected. While the cameras may have reinforced workplace discipline by making employees feel under constant surveillance, the recordings were reportedly being used for another purpose: training humanoid robots.

Many modern robotics systems learn through large-scale demonstrations of human behavior. By feeding AI models thousands of hours of footage showing skilled workers performing tasks, developers train systems to recognize the sequence of movements, hand positions, and decisions required to complete jobs such as sewing garments or attaching buttons. The goal is to enable robots to eventually reproduce those actions autonomously.

As Lalita’s experience illustrates, this approach raises difficult questions about who benefits from workers’ labor and data. Employees not only produce the goods that generate revenue for manufacturers, but may also be creating valuable training data that robotics companies can use to develop future automation—often without clear disclosure or additional compensation.

The long-term ambition for many robotics firms is to build versatile humanoid robots capable of working across a wide range of manufacturing environments. Whether that vision becomes technically or economically feasible remains uncertain. Garment production, in particular, involves highly dexterous work that continues to challenge even the most advanced robotic systems.

Still, the practice described in The Guardian highlights a broader ethical concern: workers may be unknowingly helping develop technologies designed to reduce the need for their own labor, while having little say in how their data is collected, used, or monetized.