Re:Rentahuman – The Meatspace Layer for AI
by zvqcMMV6Zcr on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @06:53AM
(#46869838)
Amazon's Mechanical Turk exists since 2005, so we are 20 years in the future
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Re:Rentahuman – The Meatspace Layer for AI
by oytis on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @07:02AM
(#46869918)
Mechanical Turk was for humans to rent a human, which is not a new idea
Re:Rentahuman – The Meatspace Layer for AI
by notpushkin on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @07:32AM
(#46870216)
mTurk has an API (and I guess it had it since the beginning). It is, of course, very AWS-que, but LLMs should be able to use it just fine.
∗ ∗ ∗
> which is not a new idea
I don’t think “[x] but for agents” counts as a new idea for every [x]. I’d say it’s just one new idea, at most.
Re:Rentahuman – The Meatspace Layer for AI
by vidarh on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @07:53AM
(#46870401)
I mean, the entire name of Mechanical Turk plays on "packaging up humans as technology", given the original Mechanical Turk was a "machine" where the human inside did the work.
Re:Rentahuman – The Meatspace Layer for AI
by albert_e on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @11:02AM
(#46872716)
MechanicalTurk is for desk jobs and for tasks that originate as ideas in a human mind -- even if they get routed via an API.
Here we are talking about AI agents coming up with a set of tasks as part of their thinking/reasoning step ..and when some of those tasks are real world physical tasks, assign them to a willing human being.
Those tasks wont necessarily be desk jobs or knowledge work.
It could be say -- go chop a tree, or go wave a protest banner, or go flip the open/close sign on my shopfront, or go and preach crustafarianism.