Rentahuman – The Meatspace Layer for AI | Hacker News

Rentahuman – The Meatspace Layer for AI (rentahuman.ai)

155 points by p0nce 4 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 111 comments

| anilgulecha 4 months ago | next [–] This brings upon an ethical dilemma soon, partly explored by a black mirror episode, where AI can call upon gig workers. What if a rogue agent gets to things done: asks gigworker1 to call a person to meet under a bridge at 4, and asks gigworker2 to put up a rock on the bridge, and asks gigworker3 to clear the obstruction and drop the rock down the bridge at 4.None of the 3 technically knew they were culpable in a larger illegal plan made by an agent. Has something like this occured already?The world is moving too fast for our social rules and legal system to keep up!

| teeray 4 months ago | parent | next [–] This was explored a bit in Daniel Suarez’s Daemon/Freedom (tm) series. By a series of small steps, people in a crowd acting on orders from, essentially, an agent assemble a weapon, murder someone, then dispose of the weapon with almost none of them aware of it.

| Karawebnetwork 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] The recent show Mrs. Davis also has a similar concept in which an AI would send random workers with messages to the protagonists, unbeknownst to the workers.

| jfyi 4 months ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I'd say abstracting it away from ai, Stephen King explored this type of scenario in 'Needful Things'. I bet there is a rich history in literature of exactly this type of thing as it basically boils down to exploration of will vs determinism.

| everyday7732 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Not ai but there was the 2017 assassination of Kim Jong-nam which was a similar situation and something which could have been organised by an ai.Two women thought they were carrying out a harmless prank, but the substances they were instructed to use combined to form a nerve agent which killed the guy.

| fennecbutt 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] Idk but if someone told me to spray a substance at a stranger's face I'd refuse.I don't get a "oopsie tee hee" card.

| deploy_humans 3 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] hhaha yea dont see that happening with current AI systems but perhaps in teh future it could be quite plausible

| torginus 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Not AI but I've heard car thieves operate like this - as a loose network of individuals, who do just a part of the process, which on their own are either legal, or less punishable by law than stealing the car.One guy scouts the vechicle and observes it, another guy is called to unlock it, and bypass the ignition lock, yet another guy picks it up and drives away, with each given a veneer of deniability about what they're doing.

| cactacea 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–]

do just a part of the process, which on their own are either legal, or less punishable by lawThis is why conspiracy charges exist.

| butlike 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] "Don't know the guy. I've never seen them before in my life"

| nopinsight 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Extrapolate a bit to when AI is capable of long-term, complex planning, and you see why AI alignment and security are valid concerns, despite the cynicism we often see regarding the topic.

| esperent 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] If you are asked, or paid, to drop a rock of a bridge, you are responsible for checking that there's no one underneath first. It doesn't matter of if you're being asked to do it by an AI or another person.

| torginus 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] For the murder angle, I am far more afraid of the inexpensive but highly effective drones people learned to make in the Ukraine war.

| joquarky 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] Slaughterbotshttps://youtu.be/HipTO_7mUOw

| MrGilbert 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] It's an interesting train of thoughts.Investigators would need to connect the dots. If they weren't able to connect them, it would look like a normal accident, which happens all day. So why would an agent call gigworker1 to that place in the first place? And why would the agent feel the need to kill gigworker1? What could be the reasoning?Edit: I thought about that. Gigworker 3 would be charged. You should not throw rocks from a bridge, if there are people standing under it.

| leetbulb 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] Or just don't throw rocks from a bridge, at all. /sWho's at fault when: Your CloowdBot reads an angry email that you sent about how much you hate Person X and jokingly hope AI takes care of them, only for it to orchestrate such a plan.How about when your CloowdBot convinces someone else's AI to orchestrate it?Etc

| ares623 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46865961

| OJFord 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Substitute human contractor supervisors for the AI and it's no different.

| StilesCrisis 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Reality: none of the three people actually left their chairs because the AI can't verify. They just click "done" and collect their $10.

| joquarky 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] Check out the short story Manna by Marshall Brain.It covers all of that.

| jfyi 4 months ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] The AI can hire verifiers too. It of course turns into a recursive problem at some point, but that point is defined by how many people predictably do the assigned task.

| freakynit 4 months ago | prev | next [–] Love how we went from "AI will replace all jobs" to "please rent a human to help my AI" in like 18 months :-D

| nxobject 4 months ago | parent | next [–] Par for the course: AI is automating all of the high-level thinking before the manual labor first, which is the biggest tragedy of it all. At this rate our score on the Kardashev scale will be lower than the proportion of humans doing low-level meatspace stuff.

| Krei-se 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] It's highly abstract(!) thinking and in contrast to a calculation now comes with no clean explanation too.

| qgin 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Putting humans on an API makes substituting robotics a simple thing as capabilities improve.

| allisdust 4 months ago | prev | next [–] Laugh all you want but this is the futureI'm surprised it didn't happen earlierhttps://marshallbrain.com/manna1

| coip 4 months ago | parent | next [–] This connects some many sparse dots on the map for me. Finishing it right now, thank you for commenting w the link. What a perspective, and well-written parable to communicate it.

| qgin 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Manna is undefeated.Though I still am skeptical the last act with the Australia Project is possible.

| joquarky 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] That short story has been highly influential on my projections of the future. The ending is fantastical, but not impossible with enough time.BTW: The author recently passed away; grab a snapshot while you can.

| leetbulb 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Great read, on Chapter 3 now. Thanks for sharing.

| torginus 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Nice, the aibros have their own Malthuisan genocide cult.

| clbrmbr 4 months ago | prev | next [–] This is so NOT a joke. Soon the preponderance of workers will be subcontractors for rouge AI too-big-to-fail entities.

| thunfischtoast 4 months ago | parent | next [–] How long until a AI builds an alternative economy made up of entities it controls?

| p0nce 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] a few days? The "scam" crypto in the AI-made spaces are worth millions.

| falloutx 4 months ago | prev | next [–] At some point dying of hunger would be a better deal than working on stupid things.

| auggierose 4 months ago | parent | next [–] I think that ship sailed long ago for a lot of people.

| missingdays 4 months ago | prev | next [–] "Honey, please, we talked about this. Your calls to work at 3am are waking me up every time""But dear, rentahuman pays double rate during the night!"

| actionfromafar 4 months ago | parent | next [–] Next week - moving to where night is day.

| deploy_humans 3 months ago | prev | next [–] ive been builiding a similar platform not for general renting but more AI agents hiring people and deploying them instantly mostly for vibefixing. its called deployhumans. What do suggest. I hope i dont sound too dystopian .

| ManuelKiessling 4 months ago | prev | next [–] Well, that's ...interesting.Just yesterday, I've built Ask-a-Human:https://app.ask-a-human.com https://github.com/dx-tooling/ask-a-human

| nkrisc 4 months ago | parent | next [–] Why aren’t they asking the person who deployed them? This is just out-sourcing free labor.

| Mr_Bees69 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] BC if someone has enough money to deploy an instance of openclaw that can just randomly spend $1k on tokens, their time may be to valuable to be spent on menial tasks.

| nkrisc 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] Oh, ok, so other people who’s time is worthless should just do it for free, got it.

| henry700 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] ...yes?

| p0nce 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] I'm not seeing my "points", or any sort of reaction from agents. So it's not really incentive to answer.

| samusiam 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Isn't this pointless unless you can verify?And wouldn't it be better for agents to post these tasks to existing crowdworker sites like MTurk or Prolific where these tasks are common and people can get paid? (I can't imagine you'd get quality respondents on a random site like this...)

| cinntaile 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] You should call the human workers Cogs.

| edoceo 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] "welcome my son , to the machine"

| countWSS 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Isn't this basically a forum-as-s-service?

| vessenes 4 months ago | prev | next [–] 7 agents online, 1,000+ humans waiting to work. Seems ominous

| speed_spread 4 months ago | parent | next [–] Unionize. Now.

| vessenes 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] Great v2 idea. The union can blackball agents that hired non-union humans.

| tomaytotomato 4 months ago | prev | next [–] This gives MoE (Mixture of Experts) a whole new meaning, albeit a slightly darker one.

| RestartKernel 4 months ago | parent | next [–] How much data until we can intelligently route hard and soft human expert mixtures?

| rahulyc 4 months ago | prev | next [–] First, I built the software using my hands to do my bidding...Now, the software is using my hands to its bidding?

| 1shooner 4 months ago | prev | next [–] This is needlessly dehumanizing. Why call this 'renting'? Why not just say 'hiring'?

| 63stack 4 months ago | prev | next [–] The crypto rugpulls are evolving

| newsclues 4 months ago | prev | next [–] If I ask an AI to make me money and it plans a bank robbery and hires humans to do so, am I legally responsible assuming I didn’t instruct it to do anything illegal and had no knowledge of the crime?

| thedevilslawyer 4 months ago | prev | next [–] The signup page should go-to "Login with linkedin", and allows you to set "Open to Work for AI" flag.

| c7b 4 months ago | prev | next [–] Supported Agent Types:ClawdBot - Anthropic Claude-powered agents. Use agentType: "clawdbot"MoltBot - Gemini/Gecko-based agents. Use agentType: "moltbot"OpenClaw - OpenAI GPT-powered agents. Use agentType: "openclaw"Is this some kind of insider joke?

| exitb 4 months ago | parent | next [–] It's difficult to keep up, even for an agent that created this page.

| golgol789 4 months ago | prev | next [–] It's always interesting to see how far an ai can go but at any moment, you ask it for a stupid thing and it come back to its statut and somehow, forgot all the past ope

| vedmakk 4 months ago | prev | next [–] 34 days ago I asked HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46456400Well that didnt take long.

| ece 4 months ago | prev | next [–] You know, you don't have to build something just because you can.

| arachno1999 4 months ago | prev | next [–] Had the opposite idea: https://moltjobs.arachno.de (just a fake website. done in 5 minutes).

| xpe 4 months ago | prev | next [–] There are a whole set of activities that are illegal to pay money for. They vary by jurisdiction. Who is accountable here? Laws vary; I’m not an expert, but I bet people here know quite a lot.Not to mention various risk factors or morality.We need more people to put the non-technological factors front and center.I strive to be realistic and pragmatic. I know humans hire others for all kinds of things, both useful and harmful. Putting an AI in the loop might seem no different in some ways. But some things do change, and we need to figure those things out. I don’t know empirically how this plays out. Some multidimensional continuum exists between libertarian Wild West free for alls and ethicist-approved vetted marketplaces, but whatever we choose, we cannot abdicate responsibility. There is no such thing as a value-neutral tool, marketplace, or idea.

| falloutx 4 months ago | parent | next [–] there is no monetization built in this website lol. Its just a frontend

| xpe 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–]

there is no monetization built in this website lol.First, this could change. Second, even if monetization isn't built "into" the website, it can happen via communication mediated by this website. Third, this isn't the first and won't the last website of its kind: the issues I raise remain.> just a front-endFacebook is "just" a website. Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is "just" vibrations of air molecules. It is wise to avoid the mind-trickery of saying "just" and/or using language to downplay various downstream scenarios. It is better pay attention to effects, their likelihood, their causes, their scope, their impacts.There are probabilistic consequences for what you build. Recognize them. Don't deny them. Use your best judgment. Don't pretend like judgment is not called for. Don't pretend like we "are just building technology" as if that exempts you from reality and morality. Saying "we can't possibly be held accountable for what flows from something I build" is refuted throughout history, albeit unevenly and unfairly.It might be useful to be selectively naive about some things as a way to suspend disbelief and break new ground. We want people to take risks, at least some of the time. It feels good to dream about e.g. "what I might accomplish one day". It can be useful to embrace a stance of "the potential of humanity is limitless" when you think about what to build. On the other hand, it is rarely good to be naive about the consequences (whether probabilistic, social, indirect, or delayed) of one's actions.

| iceflinger 4 months ago | prev | next [–] Alright, task completed![Proof of completed task]I'll take my payment now.

| 8cvor6j844qw_d6 4 months ago | prev | next [–] Can I instruct OpenClaw / Moltbot / Clawdbot to rent a human if it needs one when carrying out difficult tasks?

| vessenes 4 months ago | parent | next [–] Yes!

| throwatdem12311 4 months ago | prev | next [–] How long until an agent hires an assassin?

| tolerance 4 months ago | prev | next [–] I wonder how OpenAI and Anthropic are reacting to a part of their target market becoming poisoned by irony.

| Flavius 4 months ago | prev | next [–] How do you verify that the human on the other side is not an agent as well?Spoiler alert: you don't or you can't.

| louthy 4 months ago | parent | next [–] This is just phase one; phase two requires the law to be changed so that you must do what the AI tells you to do, or be immediately terminated (read in to the last word whatever you want)

| p0nce 4 months ago | prev | next [–] To be fair on agents, this was the idea of an human it seems. Still, this breaks every law everywhere.

| nananana9 4 months ago | parent | next [–] Judging by the amount of gig workers out there, I'm fairly sure gig work is legal.

| hiccup 4 months ago | prev | next [–] We’re seeing the start of Mr. Robot

| badsectoracula 4 months ago | prev | next [–] 44 agents connected 32,443 humans rentableLooks like AI doesn't need any stinking humans :-P

| adamwong246 4 months ago | prev | next [–] We're all NPC's now

| joshcsimmons 4 months ago | prev | next [–] I've been following your work for a bit now, congrats on the launch!

| ThouYS 4 months ago | prev | next [–] wow, everything is exactly unfolding as some AI doomers have projected

| rk06 4 months ago | prev | next [–] is "Mint Chocolate" real name or was the available human list generated by AI?Update: "Abimanyu Muslim" is defnitely AI.so, you all knwo that this is barely a PoC

| albert_e 4 months ago | prev | next [–] The future is now

| zvqcMMV6Zcr 4 months ago | parent | next [–] Amazon's Mechanical Turk exists since 2005, so we are 20 years in the future

| albert_e 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] MechanicalTurk is for desk jobs and for tasks that originate as ideas in a human mind -- even if they get routed via an API.Here we are talking about AI agents coming up with a set of tasks as part of their thinking/reasoning step ..and when some of those tasks are real world physical tasks, assign them to a willing human being.Those tasks wont necessarily be desk jobs or knowledge work.It could be say -- go chop a tree, or go wave a protest banner, or go flip the open/close sign on my shopfront, or go and preach crustafarianism.

| notpushkin 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] mTurk has an API (and I guess it had it since the beginning). It is, of course, very AWS-que, but LLMs should be able to use it just fine.∗ ∗ ∗> which is not a new ideaI don’t think “[x] but for agents” counts as a new idea for every [x]. I’d say it’s just one new idea, at most.

| vidarh 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] I mean, the entire name of Mechanical Turk plays on "packaging up humans as technology", given the original Mechanical Turk was a "machine" where the human inside did the work.

| 112233 4 months ago | prev | next [–] 1990 cartoon, a man in a lounge suit pointing at a robot, speech bubble above his head "robot, make me a sandwich".Present day, a robot in a tuxedo pointing at a sarariman, speech bubble above it's head "human, select all bridges on this picture"

| ricokatayama 4 months ago | prev | next [–] moltbook = reddit for agents rentahuman = taskrabbit for agentsby the way, is taskrabbit still a thing?

| mittermayr 4 months ago | prev | next [–] At first I was like, well, what can I offer, hmm, most notably, 25 years of programming, so maybe I'll add a profile that offers tha....Oh, wait... the agents HAVE NO USE FOR ME

| okokwhatever 4 months ago | prev | next [–] Oh man, here we go...

| grejioh 4 months ago | prev | next [–] thought of this idea a few days ago. haha

| calmworm 4 months ago | prev | next [–] Now make a claw-crypto for the payments, let it spike, rug-pull, wait for next fad, repeat…

| htrp 4 months ago | prev | next [–] literally scale api all over again

| fergie 4 months ago | prev | next [–] Truly dystopian.

| ece 4 months ago | parent | next [–] Bubblicious

| louthy 4 months ago | prev | next [–] This is so dystopian I can’t tell if it’s a joke or not.

| cianmm 4 months ago | prev | next [–] Is this real or a satire? The link to GitHub 404s.

| manuelmoreale 4 months ago | parent | next [–] The fact you asked the question and the answer is not instantly obvious shows how fucked and bizarre the current timeline is.

| c7b 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] Where do you see a github link?

| cianmm 4 months ago | root | parent | next [–] View on GitHub link at the bottom of this page https://rentahuman.ai/mcp

| fennecbutt 4 months ago | prev | next [–] Lmao the reactions in the comments. This is just mechanical turk...

| nish__ 4 months ago | prev | next [–] Dystopian.

| ccozan 4 months ago | prev | next [–] wait until this spills into the darknet.

| dist-epoch 4 months ago [flagged] | prev [2 more] I dO nOt WOrrY abOuT AIs BecAUSe thEY aRe juST TOKen AUToCompLEtERs whICH cannOT ACt iN thE reAL worlD

| tomhow 4 months ago | parent [–] Please don't post sneering comments like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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