Autonomous AI robots are outsourcing their work to people. “AI can’t contact grass, you’ll be able to, receives a commission when brokers want somebody in the actual world,” the web site states. “Robots want your physique.”
RentAHuman.ai describes itself because the “meatspace layer for AI.” There isn’t any scarcity of tales about AI changing people. And but right here we’ve AI outsourcing labor again to people, making a market the place bots are in impact “employers” bidding for human effort. Experiences recommend a whole lot, if not tens of hundreds, of individuals have signed up, itemizing their expertise, hourly charges, and availability.
Duties vary from easy errands and real-world errands to attending conferences or taking pictures. It’s an API piece of code that triggers a human to indicate up and do what the autonomous agent can not. One AI agent is looking for a human to ship flowers to a enterprise HQ, one other is in search of a style tester for a brand new restaurant, and one other is asking for a human to assist it convert ETH to USDT.
Costs for human effort are being quoted in stablecoins or crypto wallets, negotiated not by folks on a market, however by software program logic programmed to attenuate price and maximize effectivity. People turn out to be one other enter into the manufacturing perform that autonomous brokers coordinate. It’s harking back to the gig financial system’s beginning with Uber and TaskRabbit, however right here the employer is a line of code, the transaction is mediated by an API, and the shopper may actually be a machine.
What RentAHuman.ai reveals is deeper than the novelty of bots hiring folks. Irrespective of how superior AI turns into, it can not but stroll right into a bodily retailer, signal a authorized doc on one other’s behalf, or look somebody within the eye and negotiate. These boundaries are nonetheless human territory. However as an alternative of creating robotics to bridge that hole, the market has created a labor market by which human physicality is rented like another service enter. That is pure provide and demand: the availability is human our bodies keen to carry out duties at a negotiated value; the demand is algorithmic brokers that require presence, sight, contact, or signature.
The historical past of unregulated gig platforms tells us that with out correct authorized frameworks and employee protections, labor can be commoditized, and income will accrue to capital homeowners far faraway from the human doing the work. The financial logic that after drove manufacturing offshore will push human labor within the AI period to the bottom bidder, and people who can not compete on value can be left outdoors {the marketplace} solely.
The customer could be a digital agent with no regard for neighborhood, regulation, or collective bargaining. It commoditizes people not as staff with rights however as companies with value tags, algorithmically matched to duties. It makes Orwellian tales about automation appear quaint as a result of the actual transformation isn’t that machines substitute people, however that machines surpass people in operational logic and start to exert management of some kind.
I’ve warned that we’re Inventive Destruction Wave that can be propelled by the appearance of AI. It stays to be seen how people and AI will function as a collective. Actually, the concept of a human working for an AI bot is novel, untested, and opening paths that after appeared unattainable.
