Until AI is intelligent enough to replace humans in complex tasks there will be an interim stage, and that is the era of human brain rental. People have diverse intelligence capabilities, and many times these are not optimally exploited due to living circumstances. Other people and corporations which know how to make money many times lack the brainpower required to scale their business. Hiring more people into a company is complicated, and the efficiency level of new hires decelerates with scale. With a good reason – all the personality and human traits combined with others disturb efficiency. So it makes sense that people will aspire to build tools for exploiting just the intelligence of people (better from remote) in the most efficient manner. The vision of the Matrix of course immediately comes into play where people will be wired into the system, and instead of being a battery source, we are a source of processing and storage. In the meanwhile, we can already see springs of such thinking in different areas: Amazon Mechanical Turk which allows you to allocate a scalable amount of human resources and assign to them tasks programmatically, the evolution of communication mediums which make human to machine communications better, and active learning as a branch in AI which reinforces learning with rational decisions.
In a way, it sounds a horrible future and an unromantic one, but we have to admit it fits well with the growing desire of future generations for a convenient and prosperous life. Just imagine plugging your brain for several hours a day, hiring it, you don’t care what it does at that time, and for the rest of the day, you can happily spend the money you have earned.