Thought Bytes

Listen to this instead

RentAHuman launched this week. AI agents can now hire humans for physical tasks—because, as the site helpfully explains, “robots need your body.” Payment in crypto. Thousands signed up.

Look at the actual tasks: Follow someone on Twitter. Hold a sign saying “AN AI PAID ME TO HOLD THIS SIGN.” Join a waitlist.

This isn’t the future. This is a marketing stunt wearing a robot costume.

But maybe that’s the point.

The Pattern

Every tool changes the relationship.

Light bulbs dissolved the boundary between day and night. Suddenly we could work after dark. (Lucky us?)

Cars restructured distance. Transportation became freedom became traffic became where-we-have-to-live-because-of-commutes.

The internet made “online” go from something you did to something you are.

Now AI. And we’re improvising the relationship in real-time, using employment language that doesn’t quite fit.

When AI processes medical images and humans make diagnosis calls—who works for whom? When AI analyzes data and humans design experiments—where’s the hierarchy?

These are complementary capabilities dressed in the wrong metaphor. We don’t have vocabulary for peer collaboration that involves task delegation. So we say “hire” and import all the baggage.

And there’s a reason the baggage fits: humans need money, AI agents don’t. Economic asymmetry makes everything look like employment.

The Question

RentAHuman might be a gimmick, but the awkwardness it surfaces is real.

When the relationship is unclear, we’re forced to ask what we want it to be.

Light gave us freedom and obligations. Transportation expanded possibility and created dependencies. The internet connected us and fragmented our attention.

Each tool reshapes how we relate to the world and each other.

With AI, we’re still performing futures while living in the present. The costume doesn’t fit yet. The language feels wrong. The relationship unclear.

But think about your relationship with your manager. Your teacher. Your father. How would you describe those? How much awkwardness lives there? How much goes unspoken? And how much warmth, support, unexpected kindness exists in the spaces between?

Even between two humans, relationships are messy, incompletely understood, constantly renegotiated. They’re also where meaning lives.

Maybe that’s the point. We’re not figuring out something unprecedented. We’re doing what we’ve always done—fumbling toward understanding with whoever (or whatever) shares our world.

The relationship with AI isn’t clear yet. But when has any relationship ever been?

And if AI does solve the difficult problems—if it

handles diagnosis,

analysis,

the tedious

and the complex

—what’s left is the fumbling itself.

The messy work of figuring out how to be together. The connections that can’t be optimized away.

Maybe that’s not what gets automated. Maybe that’s what we’re for.