South Korea's push to dominate the global artificial intelligence market is extracting the knowledge and skills of its workforce—literally—raising urgent questions about job security and whether workers will share in the benefits of the technology they're training.
A South Korean AI startup called RLWRLD is systematically capturing the movements, techniques and expertise of hospitality, logistics and retail workers across the country, converting their labor into machine-readable data to build AI-powered robots. The company is working with major employers including Lotte Hotel Seoul, logistics firm CJ, and convenience store chain Lawson to create what amounts to a comprehensive library of human expertise harvested from skilled workers across industries.
At Lotte Hotel Seoul, David Park, a food and beverages manager who has worked at the hotel for nine years, demonstrated the process by folding banquet napkins while wearing body cameras strapped to his head, chest and hands. Park also wiped wine glasses, knives and forks in a banquet hall as colleagues prepared for real services nearby. Each of his motions is being fed into a database designed to teach robots to replicate the same tasks. Park complained to an engineer that the cameras on his hands felt too tight—a small detail that underscores the intimate nature of this labor extraction.
RLWRLD is also collecting data from logistics workers at CJ, capturing how they grip, lift and handle goods in warehouses, and from Lawson staff, tracking how they organize food displays. The company's stated goal is to build an AI software layer that can work across robots in factories and other work sites in coming years, eventually expanding into homes.
The Workforce at Risk
The government last month announced a $33 million project to capture the "instinctive know-how and skills" of "master technicians" into a database for AI-powered manufacturing. Major employers are moving quickly: Hyundai Motor plans to introduce humanoids built by its robotics unit, Boston Dynamics, at its global factories in coming years, starting with its Georgia plant in 2028. Samsung Electronics plans to convert all manufacturing sites into "AI-driven factories" by 2030, with humanoids and task-specific robots across production lines.
These timelines reflect the competitive urgency driving South Korea's AI strategy. The country sees physical AI—machines equipped with sensors that can perceive, decide and act in real-world environments—as central to leveraging its semiconductor and manufacturing strengths to become a global AI powerhouse. South Korea may struggle to compete in chatbots, where English-language proficiency gives U.S. firms advantages, but the nation's deep base of skilled workers in manufacturing and other sectors positions it to lead in physical AI, according to industry analysis.
Yet this competitive advantage comes at a cost borne by workers themselves. Labor groups have expressed alarm. After Hyundai's union warned in January that robots could trigger an "employment shock," President Lee Jae Myung issued a rare rebuke, describing AI as an unstoppable "massive cart" and calling for unionists to adapt to changes "coming faster than expected." The framing—that workers must simply accept technological displacement—sidesteps fundamental questions about transition support, job retraining and wage protection.
Labor's Concerns Go Unheard
Kim Seok, policy director at the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, articulated a different vision. "Mastery of skills is ultimately a human achievement—even if AI can replicate existing abilities, the continuous development of craft will remain fundamentally human," he said. He warned that widespread robot deployments would risk "severing the pipeline" for skilled labor and urged the government and employers to engage with workers over AI to win their buy-in and ease job concerns.
These warnings reflect a structural problem: workers are providing their expertise—the accumulated knowledge of years of experience—without apparent negotiation over how that knowledge will be used, who will benefit, or what happens to their livelihoods when robots replace their labor.
RLWRLD's technical process is sophisticated. The company converts worker footage into machine-readable data, then has engineers repeat the tasks wearing cameras, VR headsets and motion-tracking gloves. That data trains test robots, often guided by RLWRLD "pilots" using wearable devices. The company's latest test footage shows a humanoid carefully opening a box, placing a computer mouse inside, closing it and setting it on a conveyor belt—tasks that required human hands and judgment just months earlier.
The company is among a smaller group developing AI for five-fingered hands that mimic human touch, a capability that could eventually move robots beyond factories into homes and service industries. Although current humanoids would need several hours to clean a guest room that human workers finish in about 40 minutes, Lotte Hotel hopes robots will be ready for cleaning and other behind-the-scenes tasks by 2029. The hotel also plans robot rental services for the hospitality and other service industries, with potential expansion to homes.
David Park offered a measured assessment: "If you look at the entire process of preparing for an event in back-of-house areas, we think humanoids might be able to take over about 30% to 40% of that workload. It will be difficult for them to replace the remaining 50%, 60% and 70%, which involves actual human-to-human interaction."
Yet even if robots handle 30-40% of tasks in hospitality, that represents significant job displacement in an industry that employs hundreds of thousands. Without proactive policies—job transition programs, wage insurance, retraining support, or profit-sharing arrangements—workers bear the full risk while shareholders and executives capture the gains.
Why This Matters:
This moment reveals a fundamental tension in how societies manage technological change. South Korea's government and major employers are making strategic bets on AI-powered robotics to boost productivity and offset an aging, shrinking workforce. Those are legitimate economic concerns. But the process is extracting workers' knowledge and skills—the result of years of training and experience—and converting them into corporate assets without apparent worker consent, negotiation, or benefit-sharing. When workers train the systems that will replace them, and when the transition happens "faster than expected" without corresponding social protections, the burden of technological progress falls on those least able to bear it. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions' call for genuine engagement between government, employers and workers reflects a center-left conviction that technological change should be democratically managed, not simply imposed. Whether South Korea's policymakers will heed that call—or whether workers will be left to adapt alone—will determine whether AI-driven growth benefits society broadly or concentrates wealth and opportunity among those who already have the most.