Comment by Workaccount2
2 days ago
Frequency vs. convenience will determine how big of a deal this is in practice.
Cars have plenty of horror stories associated with them, but convenience keeps most people happily driving everyday without a second thought.
Google can quarantine your life with an account ban, but plenty of people still use gmail for everything despite the stories.
So even if Claude cowork can go off the rails and turn your digital life upside down, as long as the stories are just online or "friend of a friend of a friend", people won't care much.
Considering the ubiquity and necessity of driving cars is overwhelmingly a result of intentional policy choices irrespective of what people wanted or was good for the public interest... actually that's quite a decent analogy for integrated LLM assistants.
People will use AI because other options keep getting worse and because it keeps getting harder to avoid using it. I don't think it's fair to characterize that as convenience though, personally. Like with cars, many people will be well aware of the negative externalities, the risk of harm to themselves, and the lack of personal agency caused by this tool and still use it because avoiding it will become costly to their everyday life.
I think of convenience as something that is a "bonus" on top of normal life typically. Something that becomes mandatory to avoid being left out of society no longer counts.
What has gotten worse without AI? I don't think writing or coding is inherently harder. Google search may be worse but I've heard Kagi is still pretty great. Apple Intelligence feels like it's easy to get rid of on their platforms, for better and worse. If you're using Windows that might get annoying, personally I just use LTSC.
The skills of writing and coding atrophy when replaced by generative AI. The more we use AI to do thinking in some domain, the less we will be able to do that thinking ourselves. It's not a perfect analogy for car infrastructure.
Yeah Kagi is good, but the web is increasingly dogshit, so if you're searching in a space where you don't already have trusted domains for high quality results, you may just end up being unable to find anything reliable even with a good engine.
People love their cars, what are you talking about
I am a car enthusiast so don't think I'm off the deep end here, but I would definitely argue that people love their cars as a tool to work in the society we built with cars in mind. Most people aren't car enthusiasts, they're just driving to get to work, and if they could get to work for a $1 fare in 20 minutes on a clean, safe train they would probably do that instead.
9 replies →
I love my car. And yet I really want to see all the cars eradicated from existence. At least from the public space.
No, people hate being trapped without a car in an environment built exclusively to serve cars. Our love of cars is largely just downstream of negative emotions like FOMO or indignation caused by the inability to imagine traveling by any other mode (because on most cases that's not even remotely feasible anymore).
I mean, we were there before this Cowork feature started exposing more users to the slot machine:
"Claude CLI deleted my home directory and wiped my Mac" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268222
"Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database, faked data, told fibs" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632575
"Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46103532
That's what I am saying though. Anecdotes are the wrong thing to focus on, because if we just focused on anecdotes, we would all never leave our beds. People's choices are generally based on their personal experience, not really anecdotes online (although those can be totally crippling if you give in).
Car crashes are incredibly common and likewise automotive deaths. But our personal experience keeps us driving everyday, regardless of the stories.
We as a society put a whole lot of effort into making cars safer. Seatbelts, ABS, airbags.. Claude Code should have airbags too!
4 replies →
> So even if Claude cowork can go off the rails and turn your digital life upside down, as long as the stories are just online or "friend of a friend of a friend", people won't care much.
This is anecdotal but "people" care quite a lot in the energy sector. I've helped build our own AI Agent pool and roll it out to our employees. It's basically a librechat with our in-house models, where people can easily setup base instruction sets and name their AI's funny things, but are otherwise similar to using claude or chatgpt in a browser.
I'm not sure we're ever going to allow AI's access to filesystems, we barely allow people access to their own files as it is. Nothing that has happened in the past year has altered the way our C level view the security issues with AI in any other direction than being more restrictive. I imagine any business that cares about security (or is forced to care by leglislation) isn't looking at this as a they do cars. You'd have to be very unlucky (or lucky?) to shut down the entire power grid of Europe with a car. You could basically do it with a well placed AI attack.
Ironically, you could just hack the physical components which probably haven't had their firmware updated for 20 years. If you even need to hack it, because a lot of it frankly has build in backdoors. That's a different story that nobody on the C levels care about though.
[dead]