2026-08-27 / Signal #5
Figure is paying the world to film its own replacement
“They’re paying you $15 million to show the robot how you fold laundry.”
The Story
Humanoid-robot company Figure came out of stealth with Index, an app that pays people to record themselves cooking, cleaning, changing oil, scooping litter. 264k downloads, 16 million videos, 30 minutes of footage ingested every second — about 4.9 years of human work per day. Figure says vendors couldn’t supply the data, so it built a gig platform. The last line of the post is the tell: today a person comes to clean your house; eventually a robot will.
Why It Matters
Mechanical Turk for physics, launched the same week Amazon unplugs Mechanical Turk. People are not training a chatbot. They are selling the muscle memory of chores so a humanoid can do the chore. Money, identity, work, and a phone in a kitchen.
Evidence
Figure AI official post, 25 Aug 2026: Index app, $15M already paid to “Creators,” $1B pledged to data/compute over 12 months.
Sources
Daily scan: 2026-08-27