One of the inventors of Siri, the original AI agent, wants you to “handle with care” when it comes to artificial intelligence. But are we becoming too cautious around AI in Europe and risking our future?
One of the inventors of Siri, the original AI agent, wants you to “handle with care” when it comes to artificial intelligence. But are we becoming too cautious around AI in Europe and risking our future?
Neither does an AI agent. You give it power (electricity), you give it access to your computer / phone, any cloud storage accounts you may have, local NAS, network connectivity. You do all these things just like you install a lock on a door, or don’t. Once the lock is installed and you leave the premises, you are trusting the lock to do what it does.
If you hand an AI your CC#, you get what you deserve.
If you hand an AI access to your hard drive and you store your CC# on your hard drive, you get what you deserve.
If you leave your door unlocked and the school bus lets a bunch of 14 year olds off by your house while you’re away, you get what you deserve.
If you install Microsoft Windows 11 AI edition on your PC and let these AI features run, you get what you deserve.
I have many “smart home” appliances and features. They do not: control things that make fire, control the lights on our staircase, control the house door locks. I give them such access as I trust them with. I do “overtrust” one with alarm clock features, and the morning our power went out at 4AM we overslept, just like would have happened if we used an old 1960s style electric alarm clock. You can go back to wind-up with bells, if you like, or you can accept that the modern world isn’t always more reliable than the older ways.
The AI stuff I have been working with has an explicit switch: Agent mode vs Plan mode. In Agent mode it can (and frequently does) do all sorts of surprising things, some good, some bad. In Plan mode all it does is throw responses up on the screen for me to read, no modification of files on my system. I effectively ran in “Plan mode” for a few months, copy-pasting stuff by hand back and forth - it was still more useful than web-search, imperfect, annoyingly incorrect at times, but I was in “total control” over what got written to (and read from) files on my system. I’ve had Agent mode access for about 6 weeks now. All in all, Agent mode is 10x more productive. And I have never, ever, even slightly considered the thought of handing it my CC#, though I’m sure many people will, and eventually we’ll get a story about how one of these wonky agents ordered three lifetime supplies of Tide Pods on Amazon when it was asked to get some detergent.
We’re not talking about firing up chat gpt in a web browser here. Microsoft is installing “agentic AI” on windows machines regardless of whether or not customers want it. They don’t have a say in the matter except the more tech savvy of them who will find ways to edge around the restrictions on how long you can delay downloads or whether or not certain features get downloaded at all.
Saying otherwise (that it’s just consumers deciding to use this “feature”) is as disingenuous as your first bad analogy about the lock. Especially since you haven’t explained what function this AI performs. The lock performs a singular function adequately enough for the risk involved for most people. And it does it passively. The AI is not the same no matter how often or how hard you try to shoehorn it into your silly analogy.
You explained your doubling and tripling down quite adequately when you said you work in AI. It would be helpful to this conversation if you could stop drinking the flavorade for five minutes and just think about the fact that people don’t want this and Microsoft is saying that they know it’s problematic but they are forcing it on people anyway.
This conversation is over though because you want to be right more than you want to be logical and correct and so now you are neither. Have a nice life.
The tech savvy will run Linux. They all (tech savvy or not) have a say in the matter. Even my non-tech savvy wife has been using an Ubuntu laptop, purchased direct from Dell, pre-configured by the factory with Ubuntu 22.04 for the past 3 years. I recently talked her off of her Samsung fetish into the slightly less evil Pixel line of phones. It’s a purchase and use decision. Walking away from Windows isn’t all that hard for most people, if they would just do it. Most are so bloody apathetic, they get what they deserve.
(Some) corporations are going to go hard for the AI in Windows on corporate IT managed machines because “magic free productivity fairy dust…” no, they don’t know how it works, or if it will work, or if it will be a bigger waste of time than the Solitaire app, but it’s new and a lot of corporations embrace the new simply based on Fear Of Missing Out.
Technology marches on, the world does get more complicated. Before we had metal keys that had to be made by keysmiths, there were more simple latches that people could open but most animals couldn’t. Metal keys introduced all kinds of complexity and inter-dependencies and failure modes, but generally we have adopted them as the preferred solution over a peg through two holes.
A lot of people do want it, I’m not saying that people who don’t want it should be forced to use it, far from that. But people have to start standing up for themselves when it comes to what tech they do and don’t allow into their lives. Nobody is making people wear smartwatches, or have smart-speaker(microphones) in their homes, and you’re not actually forced to use any particular desktop operating system either. Maybe your job forces you to use one for work, that’s why you get the paycheck - for doing what they want.
Only the people who let themselves be forced. Our local dominant grocery chain started inflating their prices radically about 7 years ago, we have plenty of other stores around town, but over half are this dominant chain. I shopped in that chain my whole life, since my grandmother pushed me around in the cart, I stocked shelves in one during college, and it was our 95%+ source of food up until about 7 years ago. I finally had enough with the price abuse when they were about 30% higher than the competition, we stopped going there. They’re over 100% higher than the competition now in most prices and people STILL shop there in droves. Nobody is forcing them to, they’re volunteering to pay double to keep using their familiar grocery store.
I hope the world of desktop operating systems is different, but it’s probably not. People who put up with intrusive agents on their PCs doing things they don’t understand: get what they deserve.