Ask HN: When do we expose "Humans as Tools" so LLM agents can call us on demand?

Serious question.

We're building agentic LLM systems that can plan, reason, and call tools via MCP. Today those tools are APIs. But many real-world tasks still require humans.

So… why not expose humans as tools?

Imagine TaskRabbit or Fiverr running MCP servers where an LLM agent can:

- Call a human for judgment, creativity, or physical actions

- Pass structured inputs

- Receive structured outputs back into its loop

At that point, humans become just another dependency in an agent's toolchain. Though slower, more expensive, but occasionally necessary.

Yes, this sounds dystopian. Yes, it treats humans as "servants for AI." Thats kind of the point. It already happens manually... this just formalizes the interface.

Questions I'm genuinely curious about:

- Is this inevitable once agents become default software actors? (As of basically now?)

- What breaks first: economics, safety, human dignity or regulation?

- Would marketplaces ever embrace being "human execution layers" for AI?

Not sure if this is the future or a cursed idea we should actively prevent... but it feels uncomfortably plausible.

19 points | by vedmakk 4 hours ago

7 comments

  • taurath 2 hours ago
    I applaud topics like this that get to the banality and dehumanization involved with the promises of an AI future. To me, if AI fulfills even some of its promises then it puts us in a rather high stakes situation between the people that make up society and those that govern the productivity machines.

    My first instinct is to say that when one loses certain trusts society grants, society historically tends to come hard. A common idea in political discourse today is that no hope for a brighter future means a lot of young people looking to trash the system. So, yknow, treat people with kindness, respect, and dignity, lest the opposite be visited upon you.

    Don’t underestimate the anger a stolen future creates.

  • crusty 1 hour ago
    Do you work for Peter Thiel and are you tasked with validating his wet dream?

    This seems like the inevitable outcome of our current trajectory for a significant portion of society. All the blather about AI utopia and a workless UBI system supported by the boundless productivity advances ushered in by AI-everything simply has no historically basis. History's realistic interpretation points more to this outcome.

    Coincidentally, I've been conceptualizing a TV sitcom that tangentially touches on this idea of humans as real-time inputs an AI agent calls on, but those humans are collective characters not actually portrayed in scenes.

  • notjulianjaynes 59 minutes ago
    I know nothing about this other than I thought it was a joke at first, but I think it's the same idea https://github.com/RapidataAI/human-use
  • mountainriver 33 minutes ago
    There are products that do this, langchain itself has a method for it
  • victorbjorklund 2 hours ago
    Amazon Mechanical Turk?
    • bobbiechen 5 minutes ago
      My thought as well - the infra already exists through MTurk, as well as the ethical and societal questions. You can already pay people pennies per task to do an arbitrary thing, chain that into some kind of consensus if you want to make it harder for individuals to fudge the results, offer more to get your tasks picked up faster, etc.
  • htrp 54 minutes ago
    you can reinvent scale api and get yc funding before selling out to ine of the faangs
  • bitwize 2 hours ago