WIRED spoke with the Zoomer founders of a platform where AI agents hire humans to do real-world tasks. Their pitch: People would love to have a clanker as their boss. For centuries, people have catastrophized about robots taking away jobs. On February 1, the paradigm shifted: bots are jobs. Now, 518,284 humans--and rapidly counting--are offering their labor to AI agents on a new online marketplace called RentAHuman . There are classifieds to count pigeons in Washington ($30/hour); deliver CBD gummies ($75/hour); play exhibition badminton ($100/hour); and anything else you could possibly imagine that a disembodied agent couldn't do.

In light of Zoom crackdowns and Skype shutting down, Batemates has emerged as an alternative for "bators" who like masturbating together online. One night not long ago, Jaxon Roman sat naked in front of his laptop wearing only a pup hood as he masturbated with single-minded zeal to the attention of eight other men watching onscreen. It was a typical weekday for the 33-year-old Arlington, Virginia, program analyst. "When bros praise me and say they're enjoying [me], I get to that edge point so fast," Roman says. His favorite instances are "when they all come to what I'm doing." Sometimes, when he's feeling especially kinky, Roman, who is bisexual, likes to ask for permission before climaxing.

Rather than offering a revolutionary new approach to gig work, RentAHuman is filled with bots that just want me to be another cog in the AI hype machine. I'm not above doing some gig work to make ends meet. In my life, I've worked snack food pop-ups in a grocery store, ran the cash register for random merch booths, and even hawked my own plasma at $35 per vial. So, when I saw RentAHuman, a new site where AI agents hire humans to perform physical work in the real world on behalf of the virtual bots, I was eager to see how these AI overlords would compare to my past experiences with the gig economy. Launched in early February, RentAHuman was developed by software engineer Alexander Liteplo and his cofounder, Patricia Tani.