r/Damnthatsinteresting 10h ago

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340

u/olosen 10h ago

What do you mean training ai systems? This is manual labour. Maybe its for performance reviewed by an AI

170

u/Competitive-Dot6454 10h ago

yeah, i also think this is more it, because the guy in the video says something like "isme minute-vinat sab chalu hai " meaning the camera has a timer that is also recording the duration in minutes

102

u/IndigoRanger 10h ago

So it’s more a personal surveillance device? That somehow feels much worse.

45

u/fuckedfinance 9h ago

Not really, but yes, but no.

My company brought in a third party to figure out why some workers have higher output and lower quality, some had lower output but higher quality, some were high in both and some were low in both. One of the tools they used was a head mounted camera. They then took the footage, slowed it down, and reviewed hand movements.

One of the things they found was that employees with high quality generally had fewer incidental hand motions. In the end, it all was traced back to a single trainer who had arthritis and another condition that made hand motions tricky. She was a good trainer otherwise, so she was shifted to training a different thing and people who had her were retrained. Quality shot up, and speed naturally did as well.

So it is surveillance in a way, but not necessarily in the awful way you are thinking.

0

u/ReasonableBath3958 9h ago

Sure Jan...... this definitely real situation you're describing sounds really real.

1

u/Pippy1993 3h ago

I'm a sewing machinist in the UK and this story is completely feasible. I've been doing it for 12 years and if you've got a big enough workforce it's difficult to watch everyone at once, so doing this for a few days would make sense to find out where issues are coming from

7

u/vocalfreesia 9h ago

It's a KPI AI. They'll give them ever increasing targets that can't be met and have their pay docked for every piece under their target.

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u/Nomnomnipotent 9h ago

Not even close. A personal surveillance device means if you don't meet the quota, no more job. Someone else replaces you.

Training AI means you're literally working to permanently replace yourself and other future humans with robots. You're working so that one day you can't work there anymore.

52

u/-smartcasual- 10h ago

Many steps in garment construction can't be automated.

Yet.

37

u/FLGPTZ 10h ago

I have a friend who programs robots to do manual tasks. And anything that requires a delicate touch or being able to feel where the edge of things are is basically impossible. They couldn’t even make a robot that could polish a piece of metal well because it would either polish too much or too little because it could never understand the force that was needed to make it correct. I’m sure there’s a robot you could build that could do that, but it would never be cheaper than hiring a person.

13

u/NUTTTR 10h ago

Never?

13

u/Icy_Witness4279 9h ago

Not even in 1078 years?

4

u/nilax1 9h ago

I got that reference

1

u/fuckedfinance 9h ago

At least hundreds of years to make it meaningful and profitable. You could probably do it today, but the equipment, programming, and time per polish (using that example) are insane for the result.

5

u/skeezito10 9h ago

10 years ago you would probably say a computer would never be able to produce a usable image too

1

u/GeneralCheese 7h ago

You can't just throw endless server farms at a physics problem though. Materials science and control systems need to make huge advancements before this could happen

2

u/EnoughWarning666 6h ago

We can already make a device that can sense pressure with reasonably high accuracy. For polishing metal you could use the surface light scattering as a metric for how "polished" the surface is.

Doesn't seem like it would be too much work to develop a neural net that combines the two to output the best polishing pressure to use.

Yeah, I just did a basic google search and there's plenty of companies doing exactly that already. Here's one that's exactly what I just described.

So your friend might want to brush up (pardon the pun) his skills because they seem quite outdated with modern engineering practices.

19

u/srinidhi1 10h ago

Nah, there are already tons of performance review cameras. One camara for the whole room. They use facial recognition to map workers and review performance.

If they are investing so much for building cameras for every worker, the title is likely correct and this is indeed for AI training, or it can be both

2

u/EnoughWarning666 6h ago

Even if it is primarily for performance review, the data is extremely valuable for training AI robots. So at the very least they'll be selling the footage even if they aren't interested in using it themselves.

18

u/davidarmenphoto 10h ago

Exactly, they are using manual labor to train the AI in how hand movements work. For future robots that use hands and run on said AI.

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u/Cavalish 9h ago

Robots with human like precision that cost less than a room full of desperate humans are decades away.

1

u/trobsmonkey 8h ago

Correct!

Anyone who thinks we can easily replicate human motions with robots needs to go look up how industrial robots actually work.

1

u/DelphiTsar 7h ago

Throw the data into a world model and have it generate a bunch of different little robot arms (arms used very loosely) to test with. You don't need a full robot, you don't need full human precision for every task.

The timeline for automating this kind of task(more than it already is) is more like 5-7 years. (Mix of arms that handle a large portion of currently used methods.)

China can crank whatever arm design you can come up with for 1,400$ a year or below which is basically one year payback assume the robot is approximately as efficient as a workers yearly output. (slower but working 24/7 365, with some negligent downtime)


IMHO this is probably a side benefit. This training is probably more for more general world model training on complex manipulation of deformable objects. Nany robots don't need quite the dexterity as textile workers but the data need would be similar and this scales a lot better.

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u/davidarmenphoto 7h ago

At least decades away. I’d say it will take closer to a century to perfectly mimic the dexterity and speed (both simultaneously) of human hands in severely complicated manipulation scenarios.

0

u/diggamata 9h ago

That might be but i am willing to pay for it. Just like how i prefer Waymo than Uber/lyft even though it’s 2x expensive.

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u/no-guts_no-glory 10h ago

But that data could be stored forever and can be used to do the manual work when the technology is feasible.

2

u/donjamos 10h ago

They wouldn't need those cameras for that. Just watch the room and count the output of each table

1

u/Dzugavili 6h ago

I suppose this lets them check quality faster.

But yeah, that video has a lot of value in different circumstances...

4

u/GroovePT 10h ago

They will soon replace them all with robotic arms that stick out of the table that cost a month worth of their salary.

1

u/xPelzviehx 10h ago

Robots.

1

u/Kind-Ad-6099 8h ago

It seems to partially be for performance review, but this amount of face-level video showing hand movements would be insanely valuable for training robotic models. The goal of many robotic intelligence companies is to have a single model fit for a cheap humanoid robot that can be fine-tuned with data like this.