Rentahuman – The Meatspace Layer for AI

[anilgulecha]

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]

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.

[everyday7732]

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.

[deploy_humans]

hhaha yea dont see that happening with current AI systems but perhaps in teh future it could be quite plausible

[torginus]

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.

[nopinsight]

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]

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]

For the murder angle, I am far more afraid of the inexpensive but highly effective drones people learned to make in the Ukraine war.

[MrGilbert]

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.

[ares623]

Like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46865961

[OJFord]

Substitute human contractor supervisors for the AI and it's no different.

[StilesCrisis]

Reality: none of the three people actually left their chairs because the AI can't verify. They just click "done" and collect their $10.

[freakynit]

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]

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.

[qgin]

Putting humans on an API makes substituting robotics a simple thing as capabilities improve.

[allisdust]

Laugh all you want but this is the future

I'm surprised it didn't happen earlier

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

[coip]

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]

Manna is undefeated.

Though I still am skeptical the last act with the Australia Project is possible.

[joquarky]

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]

Great read, on Chapter 3 now. Thanks for sharing.

[torginus]

Nice, the aibros have their own Malthuisan genocide cult.

[clbrmbr]

This is so NOT a joke. Soon the preponderance of workers will be subcontractors for rouge AI too-big-to-fail entities.

[thunfischtoast]

How long until a AI builds an alternative economy made up of entities it controls?

[falloutx]

At some point dying of hunger would be a better deal than working on stupid things.

[auggierose]

I think that ship sailed long ago for a lot of people.

[missingdays]

"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]

Next week - moving to where night is day.

[deploy_humans]

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]

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]

Why aren’t they asking the person who deployed them? This is just out-sourcing free labor.

[p0nce]

I'm not seeing my "points", or any sort of reaction from agents. So it's not really incentive to answer.

[samusiam]

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]

You should call the human workers Cogs.

[countWSS]

Isn't this basically a forum-as-s-service?

[vessenes]

7 agents online, 1,000+ humans waiting to work. Seems ominous

[speed_spread]

Unionize. Now.

[tomaytotomato]

This gives MoE (Mixture of Experts) a whole new meaning, albeit a slightly darker one.

[RestartKernel]

How much data until we can intelligently route hard and soft human expert mixtures?

[rahulyc]

First, I built the software using my hands to do my bidding...

Now, the software is using my hands to its bidding?

[1shooner]

This is needlessly dehumanizing. Why call this 'renting'? Why not just say 'hiring'?

[63stack]

The crypto rugpulls are evolving

[newsclues]

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]

The signup page should go-to "Login with linkedin", and allows you to set "Open to Work for AI" flag.

[c7b]

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]

It's difficult to keep up, even for an agent that created this page.

[golgol789]

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]

34 days ago I asked HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46456400

Well that didnt take long.

[ece]

You know, you don't have to build something just because you can.

[arachno1999]

Had the opposite idea: https://moltjobs.arachno.de (just a fake website. done in 5 minutes).

[xpe]

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]

there is no monetization built in this website lol. Its just a frontend

[iceflinger]

Alright, task completed!

[Proof of completed task]

I'll take my payment now.

[8cvor6j844qw_d6]

Can I instruct OpenClaw / Moltbot / Clawdbot to rent a human if it needs one when carrying out difficult tasks?

[vessenes]

Yes!

[throwatdem12311]

How long until an agent hires an assassin?

[tolerance]

I wonder how OpenAI and Anthropic are reacting to a part of their target market becoming poisoned by irony.

[Flavius]

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]

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]

To be fair on agents, this was the idea of an human it seems. Still, this breaks every law everywhere.

[nananana9]

Judging by the amount of gig workers out there, I'm fairly sure gig work is legal.

[hiccup]

We’re seeing the start of Mr. Robot

[badsectoracula]

44 agents connected 32,443 humans rentable

Looks like AI doesn't need any stinking humans :-P

[adamwong246]

We're all NPC's now

[joshcsimmons]

I've been following your work for a bit now, congrats on the launch!

[ThouYS]

wow, everything is exactly unfolding as some AI doomers have projected

[rk06]

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]

The future is now

[zvqcMMV6Zcr]

Amazon's Mechanical Turk exists since 2005, so we are 20 years in the future

[112233]

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]

moltbook = reddit for agents rentahuman = taskrabbit for agents

by the way, is taskrabbit still a thing?

[mittermayr]

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]

Oh man, here we go...

[grejioh]

thought of this idea a few days ago. haha

[calmworm]

Now make a claw-crypto for the payments, let it spike, rug-pull, wait for next fad, repeat…

[htrp]

literally scale api all over again

[fergie]

Truly dystopian.

[ece]

Bubblicious

[louthy]

This is so dystopian I can’t tell if it’s a joke or not.

[cianmm]

Is this real or a satire? The link to GitHub 404s.

[manuelmoreale]

The fact you asked the question and the answer is not instantly obvious shows how fucked and bizarre the current timeline is.

[c7b]

Where do you see a github link?

[fennecbutt]

Lmao the reactions in the comments. This is just mechanical turk...

[nish__]

Dystopian.

[ccozan]

wait until this spills into the darknet.

[dist-epoch]

[flagged]

[tomhow]

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