The Uber and Lyft gig economy was just the rehearsal. There are already now websites where AI can give you a command to do a job or task it can’t do and then pay you without any human intervention… rent-a-human.

The most important shift in work is not coming with a new job title or a new credential. It is arriving quietly, through notifications, prompts, and website job offers that appear on screens. A task shows up. A payout is listed. A clock starts ticking. You accept or you don’t get paid. In that moment, AI is not a tool assisting labor. It is a management system deciding who works, when they work, and what they are worth.

This is not a future scenario. It is already happening. A new era of labor began with ride sharing and food delivery is expanding into something broader and more structural. AI systems are already hiring humans to perform work. They route tasks. They price labor. It turns out, the gig economy was not just about flexibility. It was the training ground for a world where your AI boss is invisible, automated, and deeply informed about your behavior. Once you recognize this transition, a lot of cultural anxiety about AI suddenly makes sense.

AI is already hiring people

When people talk about AI and jobs, they often focus on replacement of workers. Machines taking over human roles in law, business, medicine, education and more resulting in layoffs and reduced numbers of entry level workers. This is a very important trend that is being discussed extensively in the public discourse, but misses another reality that is already underway. AI’s next step is independently coordinating and controlling the hiring of workers for tasks.

This is the future across digital platforms: AI systems will generate work that requires human action. It treats you as a probability. How likely are you to accept. How quickly will you respond. How reliable have you been in the past. You could easily find yourself working for a website that instructs you to do plumbing, take a photo, or babysit a child. Drive here. Deliver this. Review that. Like this content. Perform this task. It is unknown what the AI request would be for a certain day. Of course, you will even have to pay a subscription to the website for the privilege of receiving work from your boss.

What I just described is the AI ultra gig economy. The gig economy, first successfully pioneered by platforms like Uber Eats and Lyft, were largely transactional and limited to transportation and delivery. Over time, however, that underlying logic has spread. As humans design AI systems that can assign work and tap into vast pools of labor, the gig economy will not stop at rides and meals. It will expand into other areas such as manual labor, creative labor, and even political participation. AI does not need to know you personally to manage you effectively. It only needs your data trail and need.

Ratings become your economic lifeline

One of the clearest cultural warnings about this world came from the Netflix show Black Mirror. In its well known episode about a rating based society, a person’s social and economic value is determined by constant evaluation after every interaction. Access to housing, opportunity, and dignity flows from a score.

I recently hired movers through the U-Haul website because I am too old to move sofas, I do not have friends with real trucks, and the friends I do have are old enough to know better. Companies that specialize in moving were very expensive, so I turned to gig movers instead. I hired one pair to load my belongings in Kalamazoo and another pair to unload everything in Detroit, all arranged through the U-Haul app. At the end of the move, both pairs explained that I needed to give them strong ratings to improve their chances of getting more business.

AI did not make this assignment, but it likely soon will. Ratings, which once felt like a luxury or a side note and sometimes even a source of humor, have become an economic lifeline. In the gig economy, your rating is your résumé. A few low scores mean fewer offers. Fewer offers mean less income. Less income increases pressure to accept worse tasks. The cycle reinforces itself quietly.

Our economic system rarely explains why opportunities disappear. Workers internalize the outcome. They assume they failed. They rarely see the structure pushing them into compliance. Courtesy becomes currency. Speed becomes worth. Saying no becomes risky.

Desperation becomes a data point

What makes AI management different from traditional bosses is not cruelty. It is information. Systems learn from patterns. How often you log in. How quickly you accept work. How rarely you decline. Over time, they infer how badly you need the money. Reportedly, this is already allowing gig platforms to make different offers to different people for the same work. Someone who hesitates may see a higher payout. Someone who accepts immediately may never see that increase. Desperation becomes an input variable. Need becomes leverage. Also, many websites are now using AI to charge consumers different prices for the same product (e.g. Delta airlines).

This is not described as exploitation. It is described as “personalization and optimization.” But the effect is simple. Two people doing identical labor may be paid differently based on how little the system believes they can afford to refuse. When your boss knows your pressure points, negotiation disappears. The offer you see is not the fair rate. It is the rate calculated to secure your compliance.

Black Mirror and subscription desperation

Black Mirror explores this logic at an intimate scale in another episode, where a husband struggles to pay for the technology his wife depends on to live a normal life. The device requires ongoing monthly payments. Once she enrolls in the service, it is no longer optional—without it, her life would end.

To keep paying, the husband accepts online tasks assigned through a platform. Over time, those tasks become increasingly degrading, humiliating, and dangerous. Each one is presented as voluntary. Each is mediated through a digital system that pays him directly. No one threatens him. No one forces him. The system simply makes refusal impossible.

What makes the story devastating is that his motivation is not greed or recklessness, but love and responsibility. He is desperate. The system does not need to justify itself or explain the consequences. It only needs to keep offering tasks until survival overrides dignity. This is the subscription economy taken to its logical extreme. When access to a normal life is billed monthly, sacrifice within a gig economy becomes permanent and recurring.

Three Body Problem and hired violence

The potential of the AI hiring structure is represented at a geopolitical scale in Three Body Problem, and incredibly interesting sci-fi show on Netflix based on a book of the same name. SPOILER ALERT.

In the final episode, an assassination takes place outside the United Nations. The moment is not just chilling not because of spectacle, but also because of the procedure of how it occurred. The aliens connect with an assasin electronically to do the deed. They hire an outcome through technology. Without that technological channel, the assassination does not happen. There is no other mechanism because they are physically thousands of light years away.

Technology is not incidental in this story. It is the enabling condition. The aliens are not present to recruit humans. They cannot show up at the UN. They exploit an existing technological infrastructure that already routes instructions to people willing or desperate enough to accept them. The would-be assassin becomes a gig contractor. Violence becomes logistics. Responsibility disappears into the system that assigned the task.

When AI replaces persuasion with hiring

This is the core insight linking all these examples. Power no longer needs to persuade people. It can just hire them. Once behavior can be purchased directly, belief becomes optional. In March 2025, Elon Musk ran a campaign in Wisconsin offering $1 million, along with smaller $100 payments, to voters who signed a petition opposing “activist judges.” The effort was designed to tilt the election toward conservative candidates, but the deeper significance is not partisan. It is structural. Participation no longer required persuasion or shared values, only compensation.

The gig economy already operates this way. Platforms do not care why you drive, deliver, move furniture, or like content. They care that you complete the task. AI extends this logic by scaling it globally and personalizing it individually, learning exactly who will do what, for how little, and under what conditions.

This is why accusations that protesters are paid by right-wing pundits begin to sound less absurd. It is not a conspiracy theory so much as an announcement of a future election plan. In a world where AI systems can hire people at scale for location-based tasks, showing up, chanting, holding signs, or amplifying content can become just another gig category. No ideological commitment is required. Participation is enough.

Protest as a future gig

Protest as a gig does not require secret plots or shadowy operatives. It only requires technological infrastructure. AI systems already know how to route tasks to those most likely to accept them. Billionaires do not need loyalty. They need throughput. Imagine a platform where gig jobs include attending events, filming content, holding signs, or boosting visibility. Payment is tied to completion. Ratings follow performance. Higher ratings for a political ideology mean more attention. Lower ratings mean exclusion from the public discourse.

So, over time, a class of professional participants emerges. Not activists in the traditional sense, but an army of AI-hired contractors. The optics are real. The crowds exist. They may even agree with the cause they were hired to support. Or they may not. The meaning becomes ambiguous, but the spin is predictable.

In fact, when you pull back the camera back into wide view from some politicians’ rallies, you can see how empty they really are. With the backing of a billionaire, those rallies can be filled by AI gig websites, making a movement appear far more popular than it is. It is the same logic behind recent findings that contract workers in Asia and Africa to flood social media with fake accounts supporting political leaders while posing as interested and invested Americans.

This future undermines trust not because protest is fake, but because much of it could become indistinguishable from genuine dissent. That ambiguity benefits those with money and power. It weakens collective action by flooding the field with paid noise.

Why capital benefits most

When AI systems sort labor, those with capital gain leverage. They set priorities. They avoid financial risk. They shape outcomes. Workers negotiate alone with an interface. Solidarity and unionization becomes difficult when everyone sees different offers. Comparison is rare. Complaints feel personal rather than structural. Each person believes their situation is unique. This is not a flaw in the system. This is the new advantage for those with capital. Fragmentation protects the platform and new system. Isolation of humans weakens resistance and collective action.

There will be no announcement when AI officially becomes almost everyone’s boss. No ceremony. No policy moment. It will simply be harder to say no. Easier to fall behind on your monthly bills. Harder to step outside the new hiring system without consequences. Your value will be measured continuously. Your access will depend on ratings. Your pay will reflect how desperate the system believes you are. The work will arrive as tasks, not careers. It then many will realize that the gig economy was not a detour. It was the blueprint.

Final reflection

The through line connecting Uber-style platforms, Black Mirror, Three Body Problem, and accusations about paid protesters is simple. Once systems learn how to hire most humans through technology, power shifts quietly and decisively. As the science fiction author William Gibson famously warned, the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.

AI does not need to replace everyone to dominate work. It only needs to manage access to work and information for billions of people. Humans will increasingly be left doing the work that AI cannot do and robots cannot yet perform—filling in the gaps, absorbing uncertainty, and handling tasks that require physical presence, emotional labor, risk, or moral ambiguity. Everything else will be automated, optimized, or abstracted away.

When AI becomes your boss, it will not shout orders. It will send offers. It will track responses. It will wait. And in that waiting, it will quietly rewire what people are willing to do, what they believe about themselves, and how collective life is organized on the planet. This is not the end of work. It is the quiet, global automation of power, control, and consent.

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Julian Vasquez Heilig is professor of Educational Leadership, Research and Technology and a lifelong science-fiction film fan who watched I, Robot and A.I. Artificial Intelligence when they were released, films that warned of a future that is no longer far off. He writes about power, technology, and the quiet systems shaping modern life, examining how AI, platforms, and markets reorganize labor, consent, and democracy long before laws or institutions catch up. His focus is less on speculative futures and more on what is already happening, often invisibly.