alt Hacker News> Social media last week blew up with masses of people who agreed and said the incident showed that AI assistants given access to calendars, emails, messages, shopping accounts, and other resources are akin to a skill saw or other power tool. While potentially useful, they can do real damage if not used carefully.
This brought to mind Neal Stephenson's essay "Unix - The Hole Hawg of Operating Systems" from back in the day (1999):
> I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs, which it did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few six-inch-diameter holes through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I chucked in a new hole saw, went up to the second story, reached down between the newly installed floor joists, and began to cut through the first-floor ceiling below. Where my homeowner's drill had labored and whined to spin the huge bit around, and had stalled at the slightest obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid consistency of a spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel pipe handle and a joist, producing a few lacerations, each surrounded by a wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. It also bent the hole saw itself, though not so badly that I couldn't use it. After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror.
> But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner's product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure to envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it.
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Where the analogy fails is that the relationship between doing the thing (ie. using a Hole Hawg or granting agents access to your data) and the consequences (ie. ruining your house or getting pwned) is far less obvious in the case of AI, especially if it approximately works most of the time and the failures are seemingly random.
Which is why I wish Apple would support Linux out of the box on their M-series hardware.
I do not want to hand my child a Hole Hog, I want to hand them a residential power drill with the torque settings locked to a safe level. I need a fucking Hole Hog for the work I do.
There is a time and a place for every tool, and sometimes the hands holding the tool influence this more than an expert would care to admit, who instead say things like “you’re doing it wrong!” to admonish users who didn’t even know there was a difference between the tool they held and the one they needed.