6 ms·
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.
- handfuloflight 9mo agoWouldn't this be better than pretending humans are fully automatable?
- victorbjorklund 9mo agoAmazon Mechanical Turk?
- bobbiechen 9mo agoMy 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.
- taurath 9mo agoI 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.
- impendia 9mo agoIndeed, I wonder if these angry young people would try to fuck with these AI agents, and attempt to make them spin in circles for their own amusement. Sort of like the infamous GameStop short squeeze of 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStop_short_squeeze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStop_short_squeeze
- krapp 9mo ago"The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down just to feel its warmth."
- bitwize 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)
- futuraperdita 9mo agoExactly this. OP, this is basically where this book goes - AI management that directs humans around as automata.
- econ 9mo agoRight, I could easily write a few prompts to replace all but the lowest level of our orgchart.
- gnz11 9mo agoPlayer Piano by Kurt Vonnegut also comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_%28novel%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_%28novel%29
- crusty 9mo agoDo 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.
- bradchris 9mo agoCheck out Mrs. Davis (2023)
- crusty 9mo agoGreat show
- econ 9mo agoWe will never know how many brain chipped humans are already captured in his catacombs. Perhaps the brain in a jar wetware is further developed than we would like to know. Now that I think about it. I still do think I'm sitting in my chair.... Humm...
- notjulianjaynes 9mo agoI 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 https://github.com/RapidataAI/human-use
- econ 9mo agoThat talks about getting some kind of free feedback out of the human for free. Now we have to find the next level and condition the human to pay to respond to questions. It seems like an idea bad enough to pay $10 to downvote? Or should that be good enough?
- htrp 9mo agoyou can reinvent scale api and get yc funding before selling out to ine of the faangs
- muzani 9mo agoHonestly wouldn't mind more competition in this sector. This one doesn't seem optional for the rest of us in the future and I don't like the idea of Scale AI being in charge.
- mountainriver 9mo agoThere are products that do this, langchain itself has a method for it
- bravetraveler 9mo agoIf the business thinks I'm expensive now, just wait until on-call goes from an optional rotation to a machine-induced hell
- shahbaby 9mo agoWhen LLMs become better than humans at the following: 1. Knowing what you don't know 2. Knowing who is likely to know 3. Asking the question in a way that the other human, with their limited attention and context-window, is able to give a meaningful answer
- cjmcqueen 9mo agoPart of my role is designing assessments for online courses and technical certifications. This is exactly what we want to build in our assessment development process. We want the LLM to monitor the training content and create draft questions and exercises that are vetted by humans. It's maybe a classic "human in the middle" design for content development, but the more we can put humans in at the right point and time and use LLMs for the other parts helps us create a more robust and up to date training and assessment system.
- severak_cz 9mo agoIt's probably already done but in some third world country and hidden behind NDAs.
- throw310822 9mo agoEasy to do and not a bad idea. You don't need to pass structured output and accept structured input: in the end, an LLM uses any readable text. A tool is just a way for an LLM to ask questions of a certain type and wait for the answer. For example, I'm wondering if certain flows could be improved by a "ask_clarification_question" tool that simply displays the question in the chat and returns the answer. I understand that this is not exactly in the spirit of your question but, well, a tool is just this.
- alienbaby 9mo agonow the computer decides what it needs, and we bid our time lower and lower to accomplish the task .. :/ Maybe I write a bot that answers fivverr requests at the lowest price possible. We can all race to the bottom.
- Agent_Builder 9mo ago[dead]
- fromaj 9mo agoThe industry is calling it "human-in-the-loop" for now but it's basically going in the direction OP hints at.
- vedmakk 9mo agoThough human-in-the-loop is usually used in scenarios where control is held by said human (e.g. verification or approval). The difference I'm curious about is agents being the primary caller, and humans becoming an explicit dependency in an autonomous loop rather than a human-in-the-loop system.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- tmaly 9mo agoI sort of see it on the flip side. If you read through the MCP spec, there is the potential for the human input. If should be the AI doing all the grunt work it is capable of with the human putting in judgement when needed to complete some task.
- paidev 9mo ago[dead]
- jquip 9mo agoYou don't. How remarkable to think that humans would be happy to dehumanize each other at least in language, before anything else at the promise of 'optimising' for something... whatever it is... it could be the 200 year futuristic axe at this point.
- zerocool86 9mo agoThe framing assumes cloud-first AI agents as the default caller. But there's another path: local-first AI where the human remains the orchestrator and the model never phones home. The "humans as tools" model only works if the AI layer is centralized and owned by platforms. If inference runs on hardware you control, you're not callable - you're the one calling. Been thinking about this a lot: https://www.localghost.ai/reckoning https://www.localghost.ai/reckoning
- vedmakk 9mo agoHey, interesting project!