Who Wants to Rent a Human?
As AI technologies spread, the next bold, brave frontier is not replacing labor but directing it. Rent A Human turns people into “meatsack” factotums and lackeys for algorithms, handing familiar elites a more efficient way to wield command.
An Instacart shopper fulfills an order at a Giant supermarket in Washington, DC. (Evelyn Hockstein / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
What could possibly go wrong? A company called Rent A Human boasts on its website that “robots need your body” and calls itself the “meatspace layer for AI.” Customers can find humans to do their embodied work while would-be contractors can rent themselves out to agents. It’s a kind of demented Taskrabbit or Fiverr. Potential tasks include signing things, picking things up, and making purchases. As the company puts it, these are things “AI literally can’t do.” Finally, we’re going to work for the robots. Sort of. But the problem might not be what you think.
The conceit of the company is in a sense benign enough, at least at second glance. At first glance, one perhaps thinks of Skynet or whichever AI overlord of greatest fear comes to mind — whichever featured in the last film or television show you watched. Thinking on it for a second, past the instant invidious reaction, it’s back to benign. What’s the problem here? This is the first company of what, surely, will be many? Renting a human is a euphemism for the tried and true practice of wage labor. That there are criticisms to make of the arrangement is, ah, very well documented. Paging Marx, Engels, and the entire back catalog of critics of exploitation.
Turbocharging the Gig Economy
Selling and buying labor. There’s plenty to worry about in this arrangement as such, but what makes this particular case exceptional? How is this problem different from, say, contract work organized through a pinup board or a newspaper advertisement? The loudest five-bell alarm seems to be that the robot overlords are at the gate. This is, to be sure, at least worth considering and worrying about in the long run. And insofar as this is another step down the sullied primrose path toward synthetic Leviathan, it is a risk. But that’s, at worst, a long-future problem. The robot uprising isn’t at hand. The effects within and upon the current dynamic of labor and capital, however? That’s a different matter.
Platforms that facilitate the hiring of cheapened human labor — the sort that feeds and sustains the “gig economy” and the culture of the side hustle — are a force multiplier on existing forms of exploitation and a bridge to continue the dynamic as technologies evolve. AI has been billed at once as a great liberator and a risk to employment, blue and white collar alike. What platforms like Rent A Human make clear is that there will always, however astonishing each new tech iteration, be space for those who own and control the means of production and capital, and those who are moved around the board by them like chess pieces — pawns, specifically.
Rent A Human will further compress and intensify relations between wealth and precarious domestic labor. It may be the first, but it won’t be the last. And the power in the cockpit will remain the same. That those same people will leverage technology and labor dynamics is a dog-bites-man story — the change that Rent a Human is introducing to the old story of exploitation and wage labor is one of scale.
Rent A Human and other platforms like it will benefit from a technological shift that won’t change the current structure of labor and class relations — they will turbocharge them. Existing platforms such as Taskrabbit still require time, effort, and attention to delegate each task. Rent A Human, however, liberates the wealthy from the constraint of time and attention.
This relationship allows for a new dynamic — managerial compression — enabled by the digitized platform and AI. Your run-of-the-mill princeling living on the Upper West Side or Bel Air, or in whatever silk-stocking enclave he calls home, can wake up and instruct an AI agent to “complete this week’s to-do list.” However much Taskrabbit and its ilk have made easier the task of summoning vassals to attend to whatever errand and chore, they still require discrete requests and commands. That small expenditure of time has now been removed. Digital grandees can now instruct their AI agent to peel their grapes, wait in lines overnight for new sneaker drops, secure the last gluten-free scone from their favorite café, and test new oat milks for froth — all before leaving for Pilates — with little more than a spoken command.
Praise Moloch — A Wealthy Class Without Constraints, at Last
Gig commands can now be disaggregated and scattered across a fractured mass of contingent platform workers — the “rented” humans — who will fulfill them according to the schedule calibrated by the agent. The benefits to the leisure class are obvious. The new model removes coordination costs for the service buyer while workers — reduced to nameless meat puppets — are once again set against one another.
It’s true that gig platforms already pit workers against one another in a race to the bottom. What changes here is the removal of the thin layer of requisite human coordination. Rent A Human inaugurates the age of a digitized supervisory agent — a robot boss capable of self-directed coordination. Automation of work robbed workers of craftsmanship and deepened their alienation. The automation of command, by contrast, simply grants those born in clover even more leisure time. The capital-labor divide is not dissolving; if anything, it is becoming more terrifyingly stark.
How do you organize and leverage labor power at scale to secure reasonable rates, working conditions, and assistance when disputes invariably arise? The model intensifies what was already a bleak arrangement. Command no longer requires presence, attention, or even time. The result is an amplified structural disadvantage for labor.
For all the worry about AI as a power unto itself — autonomous digital actors running amok, taking over humanity, eating bits and bytes — the more immediate danger is simpler. These technologies enhance existing hierarchies. While it makes sense that Rent A Human fills us with fear of Hal using humans for its own fiendish ends, the real danger posed by the platform is that it allows those who already wield power to exercise it with less friction.
For a long time to come, AI-enabled platforms will not override the capital-labor divide. They will consolidate it and embed existing asymmetries deeper and deeper into economic life. That prospect is, in its own way, far more terrifying than any AI apocalypse thought of by science-fiction authors past or present.