Now, Indians are getting paid to teach robots how to cook, clean and stitch

These are ordinary tasks. But for a growing number of AI companies, they are something else entirely: training material for robots that find these tiny movements that humans perform without thinking — like folding fabric, rinsing a plate or balancing a scooter through traffic — surprisingly difficult to replicate.

In AI circles, the phrase for this is ‘embodied intelligence’, which is basically teaching machines to understand and interact with the physical world by learning from human movements and actions. And increasingly, India is the classroom.