There's a dystopian short story in your comment about AI that can't self-bootstrap without ground-truth from humans, so they keep us around just to mark images, music, etc. Lives wasted annotating things. I like to think they'd drag us from solar system to solar system for this purpose.

Gosh. This is too perfect. I feel like you've just captured the exact moment we're living in.

So that's what they are doing inside the pods in The Matrix!