These workers help train robots who could one day steal their jobs

KARUR, India — Three men stride across a cavernous textile factory floor of Texworth in the southern Indian city of Karur, handing GoPros and smart glasses to workers, including 40-year-old Shoba Kirubakaran. She's packing yellow aprons decorated with chickens into plastic wrapping for the brand Designs By Danica. It's the third time Kirubakaran says she's been told to don a GoPro. It's recording her every hand gesture, to train AI robots to take over this job — a fact that she says the company did not share with her. NPR informed her when they interviewed her on a recent day. "Nobody told me anything about it," she says. Kirubakaran has worked in the factory for 10 years, 6 days a week, from around 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. She makes $90 a month. With that money, she's helped her husband, a rickshaw driver, raise their two sons. And she adds, "I only know how to do this job." Scenes like these shook the Indian public in April after a video went viral showing rows of textile factory workers wearing these headsets. "This is not a scene from a science fiction film," warned one news anchor from outlet News9Live. "That is happening right now on factory floors across India." Another outlet, Asia...