alt Hacker News> But you don't fire a table saw because it doesn't know when to stop cutting, right?
If I purchased a table saw and that table saw irregularly and unpredictably jumped past its safeties -as we've plenty of evidence that LLMs [0] do-, then I would [1] immediately stop using that saw, return it for a refund, alert the store that they're selling wildly unsafe equipment, and the relevant regulators that a manufacturer is producing and selling wildly unsafe equipment.
[0] ...whether "agentic" or not...
[1] ...after discovering that yes, this is not a defective unit, but this model of saw working as designed...
But that's the thing: the table saw has safeties. Someone put them there. Without those safeties, it, too, would jump unpredictably.
Scary scenarios like AIs deleting home directories are the result of the developers explicitly bypassing those safeties.