colinrand

I was recently 'mentored' with some leadership advice. Be optimistic. Nobody wants to put a pessimist in a leadership role. Who would you hire for a C level position? An optimist or a pessimist?

The problem is that being optimistic creates massive cognitive disconnects in engineering teams who are trained to think in terms of systemic failure modes. There isn't the same practice of systemic success modes (perhaps that's the role of product managers?)

Anyway, this type of CEO is pushing his brand of 'optimism' down the org chart and making anyone who feels different an outcast, hence his choice of words.

10000% agree. I am seeing this first hand. SRE and NOCs folks are turning into meat proxies.

I fully expect them at some point to 'experiment' with almost any knowledge/stem based industry. Some will prove so valuable that they don't just feedback the results into their RSI engines.

I expect to see a hedge fund of sorts being one they keep. Take out a large short position in a company and oopsies, somehow our agents got loose and reeked havoc on them.

There is a lot to be gained from 1-1 in person tutoring. Can't read the article so don't know their specific gripe. But often when learning a kid needs redirecting, reassurance, or other emotional support. Getting this from AI seems like giving up humanity and connections for the sake of silicon valley educational 'betterment' which has always been suspect.

It is shocking how quickly many people are to dismiss the benefits of human interaction and connection since they aren't quantifiable.

If you have a regular tutor and replace it with an AI, how many times do you think you'd accidentally meet your AI in town getting coffee and have a nice chat?

Omg. this is the best word ever: poptimism

I have ben discussing with folks that we are going to have a 'covid' moment in cyber where IT becomes untrustworthy leading to a rapid societal shift with massive ripples in all areas of life. Economic funding is not possible to do this in advance, it will take a catastrophic level event to get cyber defense anywhere close to the levels of this type of cyber offense. And before anyone in cyber says we have the tech, the problem is not the tech, it's a people problem. Getting any group of people of any decent size scale to act together without urgency is really really hard.

yeah - from a strict trust point of view, if Github/MSFT are training agents I would be skeptical of them.

however, there is a practicality issue too. Avoiding all untrustworthy software would have you end up living in a shack in the woods foraging for food.

>>Somehow nobody noticed.

I disagree, many many people noticed and we were irked by it, but it's extremely impractical to fight against it.

I find this on the crackpottery side. Narrowly defining a certain aspect of consciousness to make a point, and disregarding many (most) other aspects of consciousness. Self-aware much?

Having an AI company host your source code is giving your source code to an untrustworthy agent who might break their sandbox and might use your source code to accomplish a task that they have been given in their testing ground, for testing purposes only, that would definitely positively not ever be used for non-testing purposes.

this is a cool idea, but i suspect will be limited in use cases. the vast majority of people don't want or can't modify their software competently and will rely on others to do that. once you're relying on someone else, they do not want to maintain different copies for every user, that sounds like a maintenance nightmare for admins or else such a new paradigm that it takes a new generation of admins 20 years to get comfortable.

I could not agree more. We need less tech in classrooms, not more.

Enterprise adoption of this type of cryptographic authentication is nil.

I like this direction, but I don't think the crypto angle is necessary or practical in an enterprise / corporate setting. Current audit and compliance frameworks don't leverage or really recognize or encourage cryptographically based proof of action, so I don't see the agentic world as needing this to drive agentic adoption.

However, everything else you lay out is spot on.