Julian Vasquez-Heilig describes a future in which AI is not merely doing the work that humans used to do, but hiring humans to do work that AI used to do. He calls this the “rent-a-human” future of AI. He details a future in which AI hires humans to do menial work and evaluates them.

It’s a fascinating essay which might be science fiction or might be an uncanny look into a dystopian future.

What follows is the essay’s opening paragraphs.

Vasquez-Heilig wrote:

The Uber and Lyft gig economy was just the rehearsal. There are already now websites where AI can give you a command to do a job or task it can’t do and then pay you without any human intervention… rent-a-human.

The most important shift in work is not coming with a new job title or a new credential. It is arriving quietly, through notifications, prompts, and website job offers that appear on screens. A task shows up. A payout is listed. A clock starts ticking. You accept or you don’t get paid. In that moment, AI is not a tool assisting labor. It is a management system deciding who works, when they work, and what they are worth.

This is not a future scenario. It is already happening. A new era of labor began with ride sharing and food delivery is expanding into something broader and more structural. AI systems are already hiring humans to perform work. They route tasks. They price labor. It turns out, the gig economy was not just about flexibility. It was the training ground for a world where your AI boss is invisible, automated, and deeply informed about your behavior. Once you recognize this transition, a lot of cultural anxiety about AI suddenly makes sense.

AI is already hiring people

When people talk about AI and jobs, they often focus on replacement of workers. Machines taking over human roles in law, business, medicine, education and more resulting in layoffs and reduced numbers of entry level workers. This is a very important trend that is being discussed extensively in the public discourse, but misses another reality that is already underway. AI’s next step is independently coordinating and controlling the hiring of workers for tasks. 

This is the future across digital platforms: AI systems will generate work that requires human action. It treats you as a probability. How likely are you to accept. How quickly will you respond. How reliable have you been in the past. You could easily find yourself working for a website that instructs you to do plumbing, take a photo, or babysit a child. Drive here. Deliver this. Review that. Like this content. Perform this task. It is unknown what the AI request would be for a certain day. Of course, you will even have to pay a subscription to the website for the privilege of receiving work from your boss.

What I just described is the AI ultra gig economy. The gig economy, first successfully pioneered by platforms like Uber Eats and Lyft, were largely transactional and limited to transportation and delivery. Over time, however, that underlying logic has spread. As humans design AI systems that can assign work and tap into vast pools of labor, the gig economy will not stop at rides and meals. It will expand into other areas such as manual labor, creative labor, and even political participation. AI does not need to know you personally to manage you effectively. It only needs your data trail and need.

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