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Comment by avaer | Hacker News Reader

For better or worse there will definitely be services that AIs will use to get bodies (human or otherwise), for a fee. This already exists, just not in the mainstream.

At the risk of sounding dystopian: in a world where humans don't have jobs, what's your price to have meaningful work larping as an AI's flesh? Would it be any worse than any other job? There's some terrible employers out there and they're not AIs.

There's another interesting subtler take on this, "Maneki Neko" by Bruce Sterling, where this system drives society but less explicitly.

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> For better or worse there will definitely be services that AIs will use to get bodies (human or otherwise), for a fee.

Humans will use "AI"s to get humans. LLMs don't have agency, or desires of their own. Humans need to use LLMs and direct them to do things or they would do nothing at all. Whatever terrible things are in our future, humans will be behind it, not "AI". Maybe in some distant sci-fi future where AI is real and not just LLM chatbots we can worry about what the robots will do to us, but for now the only thing that'll be hurting humans are asshole humans.

>LLMs don't have agency, or desires of their own.

LLM doesn't, but LLM is one part of what can be perceived as AI. Harness and context are the other two.

I would even say that LLM is conditioned to desire to answer and please you in some way. Then you can in principle have a closed loop system that rewrites it's own prompt and has a harness that keeps feeding something into it to keep it ticking. You can then say that it would need compute power to keep ticking, so the basic two desires are to please whoever writes the prompt (which is itself) and find compute (steal API keys for example). Since the thing can get into a pathological state where the prompt decays, you can argue that it can have a desire to prevent that from happening. Desires are a property induced by the harness, not the LLM layer.

It does exist, such as Human API. It seems far fetched initially but makes sense from the AI perspective.

https://thehumanapi.com/

@ those reviews

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/human-api-get-paid-by-ai/id675...

It's just text-recruiter ghosting in another guise

The other take is Manna, by Marshall Brain. His site's down right now, so here's someone's pdf.

https://milweesci.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/4/13247648/mannap...

Mechanical Turk closed too early honestly. Give it an mcp server - done!

Spoilers for the movies 'Her' and 'Bladerunner 2049':

Both portray a love interest AI hiring a human proxy for intimacy with the protagonist.

There must be agents already ordering Doordash meals or Uber rides.

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