The race to build intelligent robots is reshaping an unlikely corner of the economy: gig work . As demand for real-world training data explodes, Instawork , a platform best known for supplying hourly workers to hotels, warehouses and stadiums, is transforming itself into a hardware-enabled robotics business, offering a glimpse of how human labor could evolve alongside machines. The pivot highlights a gnarly bottleneck in the next chapter of the AI boom. While chatbots and large language models