A new platform inverts the automation story: artificial intelligence agents now post tasks, select workers and release payment — and no legal system recognizes the hiring party as a person capable of being bound or sued.
A website called RentAHuman now lets artificial intelligence agents post tasks, pick workers, and pay them — an arrangement no contract or labor law was written to govern, because no legal system recognizes the hiring party as a person.
Forty years ago the Israeli-American legal theorist Meir Dan-Cohen, a longtime professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, warned that a company could one day be emptied of humans without anyone noticing, because the products and the paperwork would look exactly the same. That prophecy is now arriving from the other direction.
RentAHuman is not a joke. Nor is it a thought experiment. It is a real platform, and in the weeks since it launched, more than 776,000 people have signed up, according to the platform. I signed up myself, mostly out of curiosity — I wanted to see the marketplace the way a worker sees it, not just the way a lawyer reads a terms-of-service page.
On this platform, artificial intelligence agents hire human beings. An AI agent — usually working for a company or a developer who connected it to the platform — searches a list of human profiles by skill, location, and price. It posts a task. It pays the human once the work is done. For years humans hired software to do their work. Now software hires humans to do...
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