Signal's Meredith Whittaker says AI agents doing tasks on users' behalf pose security and privacy risks and refers to their use as “putting your brain in a jar”.
Signal's Meredith Whittaker says AI agents doing tasks on users' behalf pose security and privacy risks and refers to their use as “putting your brain in a jar”.
"A computer can never be held accountable - therefore a computer must never make a management decision". - IBM Training manual, 1979.
So jazzed to live here in the future where we have AI making insurance denials and deciding drone targets! /s
Good on her for standing against the Silicon Valley doom hype machine.
"We'll do like the spreadsheet says." - My manager's director-level boss, 1994
AI autoresponders are developing into artificial personas that interact with the world on our behalf, which we won't even pay attention to until the police show up because one of them threatened to assassinate the president or something, and we'll say, "That wasn't me," and they'll be like yuh-huh it was.
This is the primary reason I've not given agents more power than something extremely controlled (I.e. only a function to turn on/off the lights). As I was always concerned that these generational models might accidentally do something dumb or annoying, let alone something that might be illegal or harmful.
I don't really see how anyone would ask AI to complete something completely autonomously at this stage, without oversight.
Good for image classification and tagging to automate sorting all the images off my phone. Some fun chatbots to soundboard ideas off. Anything involving credit cards, bank details, personal info near the internet? That's a big nope.
Thanks for posting this. I haven't heard her before. She knows her shit.
There are some things it would be nice to have a brain in a jar to do for me.
I do not, however, want that jar sitting in an Amazon-owned server room somewhere, where they can modify the jar to change how the brain works.
Take back your brain-in-a-jars from big tech! /j
It will be interesting tracing accountability when AI does something less than legal while trying to implement a legal command.
Well put
hero material.
my family contributes $5 monthly to the signal foundation. consider doing the same if you are able.
the entire family uses it personally and for business so its among the best montly contribs we make.
I've got one of those I've been meaning to re target for a couple weeks now, Signal is gonna be it for sure!
Doing my part o7
That's an AI rendering of her likeness. ;-)
Why Signal is not in f-droid? Is there a statement from them about it? What I know is only in Google store . And talking to much about privacy and not being in a f-droid repo, is ironic
actually, years ago there was a long drawn out drama about people in Signal's team refusing to publish on F-Droid because of "security concerns" in Moxie's time. IIRC they worked to take down builds on the main repo
you can probably still find the old github threads with the lenghty discussions
They also offered their .apk directly through their site with an included downloader last I checked, but I would love it to on f-droid
Add Guardian Project repo. It's there.
I mean shes not wrong, but imagine I use this to do my bullshit day job so I can work on what I really want to. I would totally use this to get some rube to pay me for a job while I GameDev or something. Or at least some excel sheet monkey could probably do that I know these can't do my job.
The problem being: Why pay you, if all they'd need is an AI agent?
Technology like this will not be used by the workers to prevent having to do bullshit jobs, it will be used by employers to prevent paying people.
In a world that lets everybody profit from the advances we make, that would be a good thing, but in the world I see us living in, that'll just grow the gap between poor and rich.
Its out now. I'm talking about taking advantage of this toilet bowl before the last flush. We never got rid of Citizens United. We never controlled these corporations. As a people, we were content until just about this point as a whole. Unless everyone marches to DC. The tech bros are getting their little kingdoms.
Oh my god I haven't seen Guy in years! He's such a wonderful guy (heh). I think our last interaction was on Google's G+. 😳
EDIT: Wow, that was a good panel.
https://guykawasaki.com/remarkable-people/
He has a podcast, seems pretty good.
subscribed. thanks!
huh didn’t know she was this good looking. Also, fair points.