She (Meredith Whittaker, President of the Signal Foundation) makes two points in the article:
First, privacy must be the default, and control must remain in the hands of application developers exercising agency on behalf of their users. Developers need the ability to designate applications as “sensitive” and mark them as off-limits to agents, at the OS level and otherwise. This cannot be a convoluted workaround buried in settings; it must be a straightforward, well-documented mechanism (similar to Global Privacy Control) that blocks an agent from accessing our data or taking actions within an app.
Yes, I would hope to see this come to fruition across all platforms, and soon! I'm mildly optimistic on this front.
Second, radical transparency must be the norm. Vague assurances and marketing-speak are no longer acceptable. OS vendors have an obligation to be clear and precise about their architecture and what data their AI agents are accessing, how it is being used and the measures in place to protect it.
I love this view of the future world, but I see no path to actually getting there. If the vast majority of users were (are) willing to give away their daily intents and actions, why wouldn't they naturally continue down that path with app introspection, screen grabbing, or the like? Tell me it ain't so, but I'm pretty bearish on seeing this become the norm.
It is for sure the same Chris Ferrie, it's even in the foreword of the paper:
Yet in all that time I never thought to write, much less did I actually write, a pithy book called “What You Shouldn't Know About Quantum Computers.” My colleague Chris Ferrie did. He's the same guy who coauthored the surprise bestseller “Quantum Computing for Babies.” Now he's back, with something for those babies to read when they're slightly older.
I enjoy his kids' books and read almost all of them to my kids. They aren't "perfect" (whatever that means for a kids' book), but my kids love them and they start to wrap their brains around otherwise inaccessible topics for their age.
Wow, I remember this! Glad you were a-ok. Would love to hear more about your story and your method of egress from that bird.
For those that don't know, LAS to BUR is the best way to get from LA to Vegas (save private) and always has been.
I've been on that Sunday afternoon flight from LAS->BUR many times; with the afternoon flight informally known as the Hangover Express and the morning flight known as the Stripper Express. Good times.
And FWIW, I still prefer FORTRAN over Perl any day...
I still have a sheet of the write-protect tabs for 5.25" floppies that I, for some unknown reason, refuse to throw away. I have one flash drive that I stuck a tab on ages ago for giggles (I didn't want to lose the contents until I got it replicated), and it still makes me smile.
I'll occasionally show the sheet to groups of engineers and ask them if they know what it is. Only the dinosaurs ever get it.
First, privacy must be the default, and control must remain in the hands of application developers exercising agency on behalf of their users. Developers need the ability to designate applications as “sensitive” and mark them as off-limits to agents, at the OS level and otherwise. This cannot be a convoluted workaround buried in settings; it must be a straightforward, well-documented mechanism (similar to Global Privacy Control) that blocks an agent from accessing our data or taking actions within an app.
Yes, I would hope to see this come to fruition across all platforms, and soon! I'm mildly optimistic on this front.
Second, radical transparency must be the norm. Vague assurances and marketing-speak are no longer acceptable. OS vendors have an obligation to be clear and precise about their architecture and what data their AI agents are accessing, how it is being used and the measures in place to protect it.
I love this view of the future world, but I see no path to actually getting there. If the vast majority of users were (are) willing to give away their daily intents and actions, why wouldn't they naturally continue down that path with app introspection, screen grabbing, or the like? Tell me it ain't so, but I'm pretty bearish on seeing this become the norm.