the door lock is not doing anything of its own volition

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 LLM is doing stuff both of its own volition

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.

A door lock can’t buy up Amazon’s entire stock of tide pods on my credit card.

But it can let in a burglar who can find your credit card inside and do the same. And why are you giving AI access to your CC#? You’d better post it here in a reply so I can keep it safe for you.

A door lock can’t turn on someone’s iot oven while they’re out of town.

But it can let in neighborhood children who will turn on your gas stove without lighting it while you’re out of town.

A door lock can’t publish every email some journalist has ever received to xitter.

True, the journalist, or his soon-to-be-ex-spouse, can “accidentally” do that themselves - and I suppose the ex-spouse who still has a copy of the key can “fool” the lock with that undisclosed copy of the key while the journalist is out having sushi with his mistress.

A mechanical door lock doesn’t hallucinate extra fingers, and draw them into all the family photos saved on a person’s hard drive.

I’ve worked with AI for a while now, it’s not going to up and hallucinate to do that - unless you ask it to do something related.

“Hey siri create me an e-commerce site”

You should try it. If your e-commerce site is simple with a lot of similar examples out in the wild to point at, I believe the latest agents actually can do such a thing. You’ll just have to give them access to your financial account details so the site can process payments to you, you understand? While that’s a joke, it’s also true. You need to be able to check what the AI has done to be sure it’s doing what you want.

I started working with AI in earnest a few weeks ago, I find myself constantly making the distinction between “deterministic” processes and AI driven things. What I’m mostly focused on is using AI to develop reliable deterministic processes (shell scripts, and more complex things) - because while it’s really super cool that I can ask an AI agent to “do a thing” and it just does what I want without being told all the details, it’s really super un-cool that the tenth time I ask it to do a very similar, even identical, thing it gets it wrong - sometimes horribly wrong: archive these files, oops I accidentally irretrievably deleted them.

In some, limited, circumstances… jobs done using a computer should be done by the computer, with human oversight. Instead of having a manager who handles a “typing pool” of 30 wives and mothers and girlfriends with all their personal issues and needs beyond the time they spend typing information from forms into the computers, three managers who oversee that the data is being ingested into the system correctly could do the same work, with a similar error rate - probably different kinds of errors but a similar rate, for much less effort. That scales all up and down the range. Instead of 1000 line welders assembling car bodies, a team of 20 can install, maintain and oversee the operation of welding robots. And now, those 20 welding overseers can be reduced to 5 who just make sure that the computer visual inspection devices are doing their jobs properly.

Them being cheap means consumers no longer value them - which is what the wars are all about: value translated to sales and profits. Price is a function of what consumers will pay, which has little or nothing to do with what a thing costs to make.

If consumers went with HDDVD you would be saying the same thing about them.

Absolutely. BluRay was Captain of the Titanic, and is going down with the whole physical media ship. Vinyl LPs are the lifeboats.

I’ll agree that Apple is the big red nose on a much larger clownshow, but… between Microsoft and Mac, I’ll just say that I’ve got a request in with IT for a MacBookPro when funding becomes available. Some of that is because our IT has crippled Windows beyond its usual hobbled state, which is bad enough, and they haven’t hit the OS-X image as hard. But, even so, bone stock Windows 11 on a modern desktop i7 still has HORRIBLE performance issues that OS-X generally doesn’t suffer from. Intrusive virus scanning, intrusive file indexing, intrusive cloud backup… Apple does these things, but generally does them a bit better (though the clowns do mess up plenty along the way.)

I’ve used Ubuntu as my desktop for the past 15 years, it’s a different kind of clownshow - one that I prefer to the other two choices, but it has definite flaws of its own.

Blu-ray appears to have presided over the premium segment of the video-disc market just as it went down the tubes entirely. These days you can buy used DVDs 2 for $0.99, and Blu-Ray for $1.99 each - super 4x premium market they’ve cornered there.

And all the corporations are looking to put all the AI in all the places… because: magic free labor fairy dust, and all that.

turn down the randomness to get more consistent outputs for simple tasks.

This is a tricky one… if you can define good success/failure criteria, then the randomness coupled with an accurate measure of success, is how “AI” like Alpha Go learns to win games, really really well.

In using AI to build computer programs and systems, if you have good tests for what “success” looks like, you’d rather have a fair amount of randomness in the algorithms trying to make things work because when they don’t and they fail, they end up stuck, out of ideas.

Mechanical key based door lock cylinders are “Agentic AI” - they decide whether or not to allow the tumbler to turn based on the key (code) inserted. They’re out there, in their billions around the world, deciding whether or not to allow people access through doorways WITHOUT HUMAN SUPERVISION!!! They can be easily hacked, they are not to be trusted!!! Furthermore, most key-lock users have no idea how the thing really works, they just stick the key in and try to turn it.

There’s only one way to be sure: nuke it from orbit.

Had a friend who used to put his super-workstation laptop in his backpack. It would randomly turn itself back on and get HOT in there at times, like firestarter hot.

Battery lore has been cargo-cult woo since the NiMH days… most of it feels like manufacturers saying “oh, I’m sorry you didn’t get our advertised life, you must have done something wrong.”

I don’t know why private companies don’t fund their own shit rather than steal from taxpayerS through NASA.

It’s not that they can’t fund their own: it’s “why would they, when they can use their wealth and influence to get it funded by taxpayers?” https://youtu.be/kTlhIQeBWHI?t=20

There’s all kinds of power and influence of people through the press is a very traditional kind of indirect power for people to wield. When I talk about money as power it definitely includes the power to influence how people think and vote and act without putting an actual gun to their heads. Twitter is the new TV and TV was the new radio and the radio was the new newspaper… All kinds of wealthy and powerful people in the past sought control of the press, not only for their own desires, but also as a bargaining chip with other people with power: “do this for me and I’ll make you look good on my platform…”

for some reason people STILL treat him with credulity.

They WANT to believe.

just about enriching himself. Of course that’s a big part of it.

Can’t make the big changes without big $$$ to make things happen.

Unfortunately, he looks like a delusional moron with the life experience and grasp on reality of a suburban 14 year old. So, a couple of good ideas in there, but absolute disconnect from the realpolitik necessary to effect true change.

a system to eliminate, not support and elevate the poor here

If you look at human population growth and resource consumption over the past 500 years, the curve can’t continue - we’ll need thousands of Earths within the next 1000 years, and Warp drive just isn’t ready yet.

If “being poor” means living like the bottom 20% of the U.S., then, yes, the poor must be eliminated somehow. Pesky thing about the poor, they still have children, often at higher than replacement rates. It’s good for happiness from relative circumstances: lots of people “born poor” can work their way into a better condition for them and their children, but it’s an unsustainable model. Just like capitalism in general.

That’s not money, that’s power. Money quits being money somewhere around a million dollars a year-ish, call it 100M lump sum. Above that, more money isn’t an abstract thing you buy goods, services and real-estate with, it’s power: the power to command other people to do your bidding.