joinshift.us
A startup is exchanging free cleaning in private homes for images captured inside apartments. The new “data market” for training robots raises concerns about privacy and the replacement of human labor.
The expression “data is the new money” has taken on a whole new meaning in a society obsessed with artificial intelligence: with more and more data, AI models will continue to improve drastically, transforming the information used in training into a resource or capability of enormous value.
Some startups are taking this notion to the extreme.
According to , an artificial intelligence company called is send young people with university education and typical Silicon Valley profile, equipped with cameras, to filthy New York apartments — to clean for free, as part of an initiative called .
The idea of Shift is that the images collected may be worth more for the industries of robotics and AIas training data, than what residents would pay for the service.
A training image collectionoften sensitive, became a own small industrya data market where companies fall over each other to obtain raw materials.
A Shift’s bizarre initiative shows how desperate startups are to stay relevant in a rapidly changing business landscape. Instead of cushy office jobs, entrepreneurs are now cleaning toilets and washing dishes in the midst of a tough job market.
The journalist Archie Mitchell, from the BBC, received in his apartment on the Upper East Side, in New York, “two graduates in their early 20s who had been through several startups and were looking for work.” The pair said they cleared around five apartments a day, five days a week.
As they served, cameras attached to the front of their baseball caps captured everything they did — collecting data that one day they may teach humanoid robots, or other specialized robotsdoing the work instead of them. The AI and robotics industries are, in practice, trying to make workers dispensable.
The main technical challenge? Strangely, the lightingsays .
“In the real world, all objects are different, lighting is different, and nothing is the same as it was a few hours before,” said the company’s founder, Bercan Kilicto the BBC. “Models need to learn how their hands, cameras and environments work together.”
In addition to cleaning apartments in New York, the founder stated that Shift could move into other free or discounted services. The company is already, for example, collecting images of mechanics repairing cars in Türkiye.
“Today, cleaning in New York,” promised Kilic in a LinkedIn post. “Shortly, minor repairs, repairs and errands worldwide“.
The service is free. There’s just one small problem… “I think people massively underestimate the level of sensitive information that indoor recordings can capture”, says Calli Schroederdiretora do Electronic Privacy Information Center.
There are those who pay to have privacy. There are those who sell it in exchange for a vacuum cleaner.
