If a robotics company pays you 94 cents to film yourself folding laundry, who got the better deal?
Figure’s new Index app pays people in 108 countries to record their own chores so humanoid robots can learn to do them — 16 million videos and $15 million paid out so far. Is being paid to train your own replacement a genuine opportunity for people with few other options, or the body’s version of clickwork dressed up as a gig?
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In the August 29, 2026 episode of Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, we dug into what Figure is actually buying with that $15 million: not labor, but demonstrations — the physical know-how that no supplier could sell them at scale. The honest tension is that the previous version of this loop was unpaid. Developers taught coding assistants what good software looks like while paying a monthly subscription for the privilege, so getting a check is a real improvement over that. But ‘better than unpaid’ is a low bar, and the per-video rate is unpublished — the 94 cents is arithmetic on Figure’s own two numbers, not a rate anyone agreed to. Give the episode a listen and tell us where you land: is this the fairest version of a bad deal, or the first honest one?
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