Comment by jbxntuehineoh

1 day ago

isn't the value proposition "it can read your email and then automatically do things"? if it can't read your email and then can't actually automatically do things... what's the point?

Yes -- definitely that's the value prop. But it's not binary all or nothing.

AI automation is about trust (honestly, same as human delegation).

You give it access to a little bit of data, just enough to do a basic useful thing or two, then you give it a bit of responsibility.

Then as you build confidence and trust, you give it a little more access, and allow it to take on a little more responsibility. Naturally, if it blows up in your face, you dial back access and responsibility quick.

As an analogy, folks drive their cars on the highway at 65-85+ MPH. Fatality rate goes up somewhat exponentially with speed and anything 60+ is considerably more deadly than ~30mph.

We're all so confident that a wheel won't randomly fall off because we've built so much trust with the quality of modern automobiles. But it does happen (I had a friend in high-school who's wheel popped off on a 45 mph road -- naturally he was going 50-55 IIRC).

In the early 1900s people would have thought you had a death wish to drive this fast. 25-30mph was normal then -- the automobiles at the time just weren't developed enough to be trusted at higher speeds.

My previous comment was about the fact that it is possible to build this sandboxing/bastion layer with live web accounts that allows for fine grained control over how much data you want to expose to the ai.

The value proposition is it is an agent with (some) memory. There are lots of use cases that don't involve giving access to your personal stuff. Even a simple "Monitor these companies' career pages and notify me of an opening in my city" is useful.

Setup automatic forwards. If I was to do this, I’d forward all the emails from my kids activities to its email.