Why Does Every Case of AI Hiring a Human Feel Like a Groveling Publicity Stunt?
Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech It’s been a strange launch for RentAHuman, the job platform built for AI agents to hire human gig workers to complete real-world tasks. In its early days, the site was overrun with humans desperate to make a quick buck — while the AI agents that would ostensibly assign those jobs were nowhere to be found. Flash forward a few weeks, and the site seems to be filling out. Examples of seemingly successful AI-human pairings are now plastered on RentAHuman’s front page, like the Tokyo resident who held a poster declaring he was “hired by an AI to hold this sign” at the iconic Shibuya Crossing. In fact, holding signs in public places has become the go-to gig on RentAHuman. While they may demonstrate successful instances of AI hiring humans, it’s obviously not a very useful task. If the purpose of a system is what it does, then RentAHuman — with over 660,000 “rentable humans” and climbing — looks …
