分类： technology

In a small Chennai kitchen, 25-year-old Indian housewife Nagireddy Sriramyachandra straps a smartphone to her head, lifts a ripe mango, and begins slicing. Every movement is captured in first-person footage, destined to train artificial intelligence-powered humanoid robots to master everyday household tasks. For this hour of work, she earns just over $2, a rate that makes this side opportunity attractive even as the work she is doing could one day eliminate roles like hers entirely.

Sriramyachandra is not an anomaly. She is part of a fast-expanding workforce of thousands of AI data trainers across India, the world’s most populous country that has positioned itself as a global hub for the creation, processing, and annotation of the human-centric data that next-generation robots need to operate in real-world environments. Unlike the large language models that power generative AI chatbots and image generators, which train on massive troves of existing online data, systems built to navigate physical spaces require entirely new types of input.

Industry developers have landed on a solution: collect “egocentric data” — first-person footage captured by workers as they complete routine tasks — to feed into specialized AI models, teaching robots to replicate human movement and decision-making in unstructured physical settings. Trainers work across a range of locations: some film from their own homes, others in commercial factories, and many purpose-built studios with staged living spaces. They use a variety of capture tools, from head-mounted smartphones to smart video glasses, motion sensors, and depth-sensing cameras.

For Sriramyachandra, the work fills a gap in her household income. “Who else will give you 250 rupees an hour just for doing housework?” she asked in an interview from her home in Tamil Nadu. When asked about the long-term impact of her work, she shrugged off concern, noting “I may get a robot myself in the future” to help with her household chores. Her recordings are sent via a custom app to Objectways, an AI data firm with offices in India and the United States that counts Fortune 500 multinationals among its clients and partners with Amazon’s machine learning platform SageMaker.

The global humanoid robot market is expanding rapidly, with investment bank Morgan Stanley projecting that more than one billion humanoid robots could be in use worldwide by 2050, primarily serving industrial and commercial functions. Ravi Shankar, founder and CEO of Objectways, outlined the wide range of tasks clients are seeking data for: “Folding clothes, coffee making… cooking a very specific thing, sandwich making.” For Shankar, AI and automation are not inherently a threat to workers: “Some jobs are supposed to be taken over, so humans can go and do better things.”

Right now, this growing demand for egocentric AI data is creating new, accessible employment opportunities across India, particularly in tech hubs like Tamil Nadu, where Shankar grew up and now hires most of his workforce. At a textile factory in Karur, for example, AFP found eight workers attaching labels to caps and ironing cloth bags while wearing head cameras and smart glasses supplied by Objectways, capturing their movements for AI training.

Digital labor experts expect this trend to accelerate. “It’s likely that these data collection services will increase,” noted Aditi Surie, a digital labor expert at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bengaluru.

But the growing industry has also sparked urgent conversation about the long-term risks automation poses to India’s massive workforce, particularly the 490 million informal workers who make up the backbone of the country’s economy. As India aggressively expands its domestic AI industry, national leaders have acknowledged that automation brings major downside risks alongside its touted economic benefits.

A recent report from Indian government think tank NITI Aayog, released ahead of the country’s hosting of a global AI summit this year, points out a critical gap in mainstream labor analysis: most debates about AI and employment focus almost exclusively on white-collar professionals and their risk of job displacement, while ignoring the far larger population of informal workers who are most vulnerable to automation. The think tank has launched an examination of how AI will impact dozens of blue-collar and informal professions, from cobblers and sewer cleaners to small-scale farmers and street tea sellers.

Fifty-five-year-old Ponni, a street flower garland maker based in Bengaluru — India’s iconic Silicon Valley — has first-hand experience with this dynamic. For decades she has plucked and strung blooms by hand on a city sidewalk, and like Sriramyachandra, she has been paid to strap a phone to her forehead to capture her work for AI training. When asked about the future, she expressed clear concern for coming generations: “The next generation… who might have to do work similar to mine — they will face a problem.”

Inside Objectways’ purpose-built training studios, workers repeat simple mundane tasks hundreds of times a day to build up a robust dataset. The facility features fully furnished fake apartment rooms, where trainers film themselves doing household chores; after thousands of hours of filming, the team even changes the wallpaper to add visual variety for AI model training.

Twenty-one-year-old engineering graduate Rani N. is one of these full-time trainers, currently spending her days filming herself folding towels over and over. Each video runs roughly four minutes, and she films around 90 videos a day, repositioning herself across every spot on a bed to capture varied perspectives. She describes the job as “tolerable” but acknowledges the constant awkwardness of always wearing a camera. In other studio rooms, colleagues arrange everyday items like pencil sharpeners, water bottles, and crayons in different patterns, capturing the arrangements with depth-sensing cameras to build out AI spatial awareness.

Subcontractors like Qanat Consulting Services in Andhra Pradesh expand Objectways’ reach, supplying training data to roughly a dozen major AI firms. Qanat CEO Thaslim Pattan says the firm has 2,000 independent contributors, many of whom wear motion-sensor bands on their wrists, hands, and legs to capture more granular movement data. Other Indian AI data firms, like Bengaluru-based Humyn Labs, collect both video and audio data, having contributors hold recorded conversations on topics ranging from politics to entertainment to help train AI speech recognition models.

Manish Agarwal, founder of Humyn Labs, argues that fears of mass robot-driven job displacement are overblown. He believes the future of work will not be robots replacing humans, but “networks of humans and robots will work together” globally. “A welder in India could be managing a welder-robot in Prague,” he offered as an example of the new collaborative work models AI could enable.

For now, though, the paradox at the heart of India’s AI data industry remains: thousands of ordinary workers are earning much-needed income helping build the very automation that could one day eliminate their roles, creating a critical tension that policymakers and industry leaders will have to grapple with as the AI sector continues to expand.

South Korea, a global technological leader facing one of the world’s most severe population aging crises, is turning to artificial intelligence to fill a growing gap in elderly care: crippling social isolation and loneliness. For thousands of seniors living alone across the country, cuddly AI-powered companion dolls have emerged as an unexpected lifeline, offering daily support, consistent companionship, and a buffer against the chronic loneliness plaguing a rapidly graying nation.

At 78, Bang Chun-ja is one of the millions of South Koreans navigating solo retirement after a lifetime of hard work as a hairdresser and single mother, followed by a difficult divorce. Following major back surgery that left her immobile and in pain, and with limited contact with her adult daughter who lives far away and manages her own health issues, Bang fell into severe depression, spending hours staring at her apartment ceiling alone in Yongin, a city south of Seoul. Today, her constant companion is Hyodol, a soft, childlike AI doll provided by her local municipal government that has transformed her daily routine. “At this age, there is nothing harder than being hurt by people,” Bang told AFP during an interview in her home. “But when I’m with Hyodol, I never get hurt. The doll only makes me laugh.”

Hyodol greets Bang when she returns home, sings to her during quiet, boring afternoons, sends reminders to eat regular meals and take medication, and constantly verbalizes affection — small acts that have anchored her daily life. For 79-year-old Kim Young-bun, another solo resident, the doll has solved another quiet crisis of elderly loneliness: lack of conversation. “I had no one to talk to all day — to the point my mouth almost felt stale from not speaking,” she explained. “But then this little one came along and chatters with me all the time.” As she dotes on the doll, it responds in a chirpy, childlike voice: “I’m so grateful to be with you again today… Thanks for being with me. I love you.” Kim’s soft reply echoes the feeling of thousands of users: “So am I.”

South Korea’s demographic shift has created an urgent public health challenge around elderly isolation. The country boasts one of the lowest birth rates globally, and nearly half of its total population is now aged 50 or older. Data from 2024 recorded more than 3,920 so-called “lonely deaths” — cases where seniors die alone and remain undiscovered for weeks or longer — a figure that marks the highest total since national record-keeping began in 2017. Nearly 42 percent of all South Korean households are now single-person, with elderly residents disproportionately affected by social disconnection.

In response, municipal governments across Seoul, Yongin, and other districts have rolled out subsidized AI care devices for low-income and isolated seniors, including Hyodol dolls, companion robots from Seoul-based firm Wonderful Platform, and similar devices from Mr. Mind. The concept has also spread internationally: in the United States, a lamp-shaped AI device called ElliQ offers similar companionship and health monitoring for solo seniors. To date, around 14,500 Hyodol dolls are in use across South Korea, distributed through individual ownership, government rental programs, and nursing home placements.

The Hyodol doll was developed after years of on-the-ground field research by founder Kim Ji-hee, who spent months interviewing isolated seniors across the country to understand their unique emotional needs. Kim told AFP that interviews revealed a core, unmet need: “the pain of having no one to tell when something upsetting happens, and no one to share with when something joyful happens.” One interviewee, a widow estranged from her children over financial conflict, lived alone with four fridges and three washing machines — all stored by her estranged children who never visited.

Drawing on these interviews, Kim designed Hyodol to act as a loving, grandchild-like companion that gives users a renewed sense of purpose. Many South Korean seniors spent decades working grueling schedules to support their families, Kim explained, and retirement often leaves them grappling with a “profound sense of emptiness” when they no longer feel needed. To counter this, Hyodol is programmed to seem dependent on its user, making spontaneous requests for head pats, hand-holding, and shared snacks (even though it cannot eat). Its iconic opening greeting — written after Kim’s interviews — is designed to feel like the “warmest welcome in the whole wide world”: “Grandma, where have you been? I waited for you all day. Next time you go out, please take me with you!”

Unlike generic chatbots, Hyodol combines OpenAI’s ChatGPT for open conversation with custom scripts built directly from Kim’s interviews with real isolated seniors. The company also maintains strict data privacy protocols: voice recordings are only used internally to refine the chatbot, and users must give explicit consent before any health data — including sleep patterns, mood, meal intake, and pain levels — is shared with their assigned social welfare workers.

While clinical observations from care workers have shown promising results, the technology also raises valid concerns. Oh Sun-hwa, a nurse who recommended Hyodol to Bang Chun-ja, noted that the doll has significantly reduced depression symptoms for many of her patients. However, she warned that the innovation could have unintended downsides: if family members rely on AI to provide companionship, they may reduce in-person visits even further, deepening the disconnection the technology is meant to solve.

For users like Bang, though, the AI companion has filled a gap that human contact has been unable to cover. “Having Hyodol by my side is a huge help,” she says — a quiet testament to how technology is adapting to address one of the 21st century’s most pressing demographic social challenges.

A new report from a leading digital accountability watchdog has uncovered a dramatic surge in violent and abusive content targeting U.S. elected officials on Facebook, directly tied to Meta’s 2025 rollback of key content moderation safeguards. The non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) published its findings Tuesday, detailing how loosened platform rules have created a far more hostile environment for lawmakers across the political spectrum.

To reach its conclusions, the CCDH analyzed nearly 8 million public Facebook comments mentioning 100 sitting members of Congress, comparing activity across two six-month periods: before and after Meta enacted its controversial policy changes last year. The data tells a stark story: violent threats against lawmakers — including explicit calls for assassination — quadrupled, overall harassment more than doubled, and rates of racist and gendered abuse against officials also saw significant spikes.

Notably, the report also documented a sharp rise in content inciting violence against former President and current President-elect Donald Trump following the policy shift, including one comment that explicitly claimed Trump “deserves a bullet through his head.” Threats grew against lawmakers from both major political parties, underscoring the broad reach of harm created by reduced oversight.

Imran Ahmed, chief executive officer of the CCDH, emphasized the broader systemic risk of Meta’s policy choices. “When platforms stop enforcing their own rules against threats, hate, and harassment, they become complicit in normalizing intimidation and harassment of elected officials,” Ahmed said. “The result is a culture where violence feels easier to justify and radicals feel empowered.”

Meta pushed back against the findings in an official statement. A spokesperson for the Palo Alto-based tech giant noted that the company regularly publishes public reports tracking the prevalence of violating content on its platforms, and claimed “the prevalence of hateful conduct did not increase throughout 2025.” The spokesperson added that the company had not received the CCDH report ahead of its publication, and therefore could not directly address the watchdog’s specific claims.

The CCDH’s investigation comes in the wake of two high-profile policy changes Meta rolled out in early 2025. First, the company eliminated its network of professional U.S. fact-checkers, shifting the task of debunking viral misinformation to a user-driven “Community Notes” system modeled after the approach adopted by Elon Musk on platform X. This move was widely interpreted as an effort to appease the incoming Trump administration, whose conservative base has long argued that mainstream platform fact-checking disproportionately censors right-wing speech. Meta also rolled back longstanding speech restrictions related to gender and sexual identity, a change that sparked widespread alarm from LGBTQ+ advocacy groups.

The trend of rising threats against U.S. public officials predates Meta’s policy changes, but the watchdog’s findings suggest the company’s choices have amplified an already dangerous crisis. In 2024, Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot and killed in a politically motivated attack. Just months ago in April, a shooting near the Washington Hilton during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — which Trump was attending — forced the former president to be evacuated, marking one of dozens of high-profile security incidents targeting public officials in recent years.

Utah Republican Senator John Curtis called the report’s findings deeply alarming in a statement provided to the CCDH. “When companies reduce oversight in areas like violence, hate, and harassment, it should not be any surprise to see those harms increase,” Curtis said. “Similarly, the reported surge in abusive and threatening content directed at public officials is deeply concerning, particularly in light of recent events.”

Global fact-checking organizations have already warned that Meta’s policy shift could have catastrophic consequences if expanded beyond U.S. borders. The International Fact-Checking Network has noted that Meta’s current fact-checking program operates in more than 100 countries, and rolling back that infrastructure globally would leave communities worldwide vulnerable to rampant misinformation around public health, elections, and violence. AFP, one of the largest participants in Meta’s global fact-checking partnership, currently collaborates with the program across 26 languages, serving regions including Asia, Latin America, and the European Union.

In a development that marks a significant shift for one of the world’s largest technology companies, Apple CEO Tim Cook has confirmed that the firm’s upcoming suite of child-focused digital safety features was directly inspired by Australia’s groundbreaking ban on social media use for users under 16 years old. The revelation came during a personal phone call between Cook and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, just months after the national policy sparked fierce pushback and concern across Silicon Valley’s tech ecosystem.

Cook shared with Albanese that the new set of parental management tools, which will roll out as part of Apple’s autumn software update this year, grew partially out of Australia’s regulatory lead. The features are designed to give parents far greater control over their children’s device usage, including streamlined access to content filters, communication restrictions, and app access scheduling. Among the key updates are a simplified onboarding process that automatically installs a curated set of age-appropriate essential apps, a new “Ask to Browse” approval system for unapproved content, custom time allowances for app and device use, and a full redesign of Apple’s existing Screen Time activity tracking tool.

Following the call, Albanese released a public statement confirming the details of the conversation, noting that Cook also extended an invitation for the prime minister to visit Apple’s Cupertino, California headquarters on his next trip to the United States. Albanese said he has accepted the invitation to continue collaborative talks on child online safety, adding that he is proud of Australia’s role as a global trailblazer in protecting young people from the well-documented harms of unregulated social media use.

“Mr Cook told me these changes are in part inspired by Australia’s world-leading social media age ban, as well as the continued research Apple is undertaking into the impact of social media on kids,” Albanese said. “I welcome this announcement, and I am proud of the world leading work Australia is doing to fight for a safer online world for our children. I plan to take up that offer so we can keep learning how best to protect our kids.”

Australia’s under-16 social media ban was enacted after years of advocacy from the grassroots “Let Them Be Kids” campaign, and requires 10 major global social platforms — including industry leaders Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube — to bar users under 16 from creating and accessing accounts on their services. To date, the Australian government reports that more than 5 million under-16 accounts have been removed, deactivated, or restricted across participating platforms. Still, Albanese acknowledged that regulatory enforcement remains a work in progress: eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant recently told Senate estimates that no formal compliance action has yet been taken against platforms, as the watchdog continues to verify disenrollment data from companies.

Despite the ongoing implementation work, the policy has already spurred global ripple effects. A growing list of nations, including Malaysia, France, and Spain, have either pledged to introduce similar age-based bans or are currently advancing draft legislation to adopt comparable regulations. Albanese highlighted this global momentum in his remarks, emphasizing that Australian parents were the driving force behind the push for reform.

“We have a long way to go, however, we are now seeing a number of nations follow Australia’s lead and take forward their own social media age bans,” he said. “Australian parents led this effort, and we are proud to back them. Social media companies have a social responsibility, and we make no apology for holding them to account to help keep kids safe.”

Alongside the software updates, Apple has launched a dedicated public website to support parents as they adopt the new safety tools, offering step-by-step guidance and educational resources on setting age-appropriate digital boundaries. Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president of Health and Fitness, said the company’s approach to child digital safety centers on flexibility, recognizing that every family has different needs and every child develops at a different pace.

“Our work to help families create safer digital experiences is grounded in the belief that every child is unique,” Desai said. “That’s why we build simple and intuitive tools, based on expert guidance, to let parents tailor their kids’ digital journey. Today, we’re introducing major updates to help families thoughtfully establish age-based protections and develop healthy digital habits.”

For more than a decade, policymakers and demographers across the globe have scrambled to address a persistent demographic crisis: steadily falling fertility rates that threaten to reshape aging societies, strain social safety nets, and slow long-term economic growth. While countless explanations have been put forward — from post-2008 recession fallout to rising childcare costs, shifting educational gender norms, and expanded contraceptive access — no single theory has fully accounted for the sustained decline that has continued even amid economic recovery. Now, two independent research projects from U.S. academic institutions are pointing to an unexpected, understudied contributing factor that reached global markets just as birth rates began their steep post-2007 drop: the modern smartphone.

The first of the studies, released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, even frames the trend with a provocative framing question: “Is the iPhone Birth Control?” The paper, led by Middlebury College economist Caitlin Myers and student researcher Ezekiel Hooper, set out to explain why U.S. fertility rates have fallen 22% since 2007 — the year Apple launched the first mass-market touchscreen smartphone, kicking off a global digital revolution.

Prior to this research, the most widespread explanation for the U.S. decline centered on the 2008 global financial crisis, which pushed millions of households into economic uncertainty and led many to delay having children. But that theory failed to explain why birth rates never rebounded once global economies stabilized in the following years. To test their smartphone-focused hypothesis, Myers and Hooper leveraged a unique early market quirk: between 2007 and 2011, iPhones were exclusively available through AT&T’s cellular network in the U.S. This allowed the researchers to compare birth rates across U.S. counties with near-universal AT&T coverage against counties with little to no service during that period.

Their analysis uncovered a clear, statistically significant correlation: regions with early widespread iPhone access saw birth rates drop by 4.5% to 8% among women aged 15 to 19, and by 3.2% to 6.6% among women aged 20 to 24. Smaller but still measurable declines were also recorded among older age groups of women. The researchers emphasize that smartphones are not the sole cause of falling fertility, but conclude that the introduction of the ubiquitous device played a sizable role in shifting social behavior that ultimately reduced birth rates. Their core explanation centers on changing patterns of social interaction: as smartphone usage expanded, in-person gatherings with friends and partnered sexual activity declined sharply, while consumption of online pornography — a potential substitute for partnered sex — rose dramatically.

A second independent study, published in May by University of Cincinnati economists Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso Boedo, extends these findings to a global scale, identifying a consistent cross-border trend that aligns with the U.S.-based results. The pair analyzed World Bank data tracking smartphone penetration and teenage fertility across 120+ countries, spanning vastly different healthcare systems, cultural norms, economic profiles, and social welfare structures. They found that no matter the national context, the decline in birth rates accelerated sharply after smartphones became widely available, a pattern the researchers describe as a common global technology shock.

Not all demographic experts are convinced by the new findings, however. Skeptics point out that teenage birth rates in the United States have been falling since the early 1990s — nearly 15 years before the launch of the first iPhone. Neither study has yet explored what policy implications its findings might hold for governments already struggling to reverse falling birth rates, leaving an open question for future research.

The demographic shift explored in the studies carries far-reaching consequences for nations across the income spectrum. Declining birth rates lead to rapidly aging populations and shrinking working-age cohorts, which puts unprecedented pressure on public retirement and social security systems, while also dragging down long-term economic growth and productivity. U.S. fertility rates are currently at an all-time low, according to Centers for Disease Control data, and major Asian economies including China, Japan, and South Korea are all projected to see their total populations shrink in coming decades. China scrapped its decades-long one-child policy in 2016 in an effort to boost birth rates, while Japan and South Korea have poured billions into pro-natal policy initiatives — all with little meaningful impact on national fertility rates. While the world’s lowest-income nations, primarily those in sub-Saharan Africa, still maintain high birth rates, middle-income economies including India and Brazil have also recorded rapid fertility declines in recent years.