Training robots

On many keyboards, there is a key that says "Num Lock".  That's the key that makes numbers print instead of a collection of various marks.  Some people dislike numbers.  They often lead to mathematics and calculation and headaches.  When I was in elementary school, I didn't like numbers since I sometimes got assignments of umpteen addition or multiplication problems to complete.  Over the years, I changed, especially when spreadsheets enabled me to do all sorts of calculations quickly and accurately.

There is a morning news item that I almost always read called "Numlock News".  It includes items from the news that have to do with numbers and related subjects.  This morning, one of the Numlock News items was this:

Arm Farms

Lots of companies want to program robots to do chores that are comparatively easy for humans with full mastery of their motor skills, such as loading dishes or folding clothes. For entities made of steel, copper and actuators, these skills have proven evasive. There's actually a reason why you might have a washing machine and a dryer but not a folder. To rack up the visual data used to train a robot for these tasks, data labeling companies (dubbed "arm farms," often operating out of India) need to strap GoPros onto human workers and have them do common household chores. These "arm farms" then send hundreds of clothes-folding videos to clients in the United States. Objectways, one such company, has over 2,000 employees, about half of whom are labeling sensor data from self-driving cars and robots. Several other employees were responsible for sending 200 videos of towel-folding to an American client. 

Nilesh Christopher, The Los Angeles Times