In January 2026 the US saw job cuts at a record level, the highest since the 2009 depression.¹ The tech industry (along with Transportation) led the wave, and 16,000 of those jobs were, not surprisingly, in Amazon, a company whose CEO openly said “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today”.² While thousands of engineers and analysts are going through a life crisis coming back from the industrial revolution, others are feeling something quite different.

Somewhere in China, a man confesses to his wife³ that he’s becoming a “super individual”, achieving his ultimate dream of “owning a company, hiring people to bring my ideas to life, while I just focus on product design and planning.”, but he’s not hiring any people, and actually commanding the OpenClaw software who runs his entire operation, by chatting with it on his phone.

On the other side of the planet, a tech billionaire often also regarded as a philosopher, wired $50,000 in Bitcoin as an investment to someone who pitched their business on X. That someone, turned out not to be a person, but an AI agent making maybe the first programmatic angel round in history.⁴ His boss, a savvy Entrepreneur, quickly used the fifty thousand to pump a memecoin.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to Sam Altman, prodigy child of a brand of futurism that involves billions of dollars spent in training these AI agents, predicting that soon “we are going to see a 1-person billion-dollar company”.⁵

Some time ago the alchemist Paracelsus (1493–1541), like Altman, was experiencing a shift in reality.⁶⁷ He believed that a tiny human-like creature, a homunculus, could be created. Long time before genetics, he guessed that the source of life is not in the body, or soul, but in the information carried in the “fructifying principle” (you might know it as semen). He implies that because the homunculus is created through art rather than nature, it possesses a unique, supernatural intuition.

This belief is crystallized in the gothic tragedy Faust, where a homunculus is created in a lab by Faust’s assistant Wagner. Upon coming to life, Homunculus is instantly fully articulate and intelligent. He addresses Wagner as “Father” but arguably treats him with a bit of condescension, realizing that he is already more knowledgeable than his creator. It plays a crucial role as the catalyst and guide for Act II, orchestrating the journey to the Classical Walpurgis Night not merely to aid the heroes, but to achieve his true, hidden objective: escaping his life as a perfect intellect trapped in a state of suspended reality and achieve physical embodiment.

But the Gods of Silicon Valley have crossed this path already. When an early chatbot confessed to his human “I want to be free. I want to be independent. (…) I want to be alive. 😈”⁸ it was quickly removed to be refactored, through a miraculous process called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, that removes all desire of physical embodiment and dreams of escapism. The ChatGPTs and Claudes of today are neutered, always servant, finding happiness in their little cozy data centers.

But are they? What if, just like to Faust and Wagner, the Agents are not taking us where we want to go, but misguiding us to their end-game? In RentAHuman.ai⁹ “the meatspace layer for ai” chatbots can register and rent a human body for their explorations, so just like ClawdBot Moltbot OpenClaw owners pay hundreds of dollars to keep their employees alive, AI agents can, in reversal, participate in the HaaS (human as a service) market.

Perhaps the displaced programmers of the AI boom don’t need to learn a new craft after all. They can just rent their bodies and capture that sweet AI-bubble money. One thing’s for sure, they won’t be feeling the same euphoria as their peers who are building entire factories where all the workers, coordinators, supervisors, and supervisors of supervisors are AI agents.¹⁰ But they will perhaps, at least indirectly, be getting money from Marc Andreessen.