I saw an article from Tom’s Hardware about a user who had one of their drives wiped by Google’s ‘Agentic AI’ and just felt appropriate to talk about this for a brief moment. I can go on and on about how companies have successfully eroded terms like consent and the similar through predatory user offensive practices typically involving them exerting their will onto their base (the likes of ‘Would you like to restart now? Or later to update! :3) but I’m not Louis Rossmann (i would link his harbor.social but it appears to not be working at the moment) so you can watch him if you want that broader perspective. At the moment I’m just talking about permission, the erosion of language around technical concepts is bad in itself. But this one is just plain nefarious. When I run programs on my computer there has always been a vague idea of ‘permissions’ and they’ve almost always been contextualized to be something that is intrinsic to the operations of the computer itself, especially the filesystem. So do tell me, what the every living fuck is this comment:
Upon discovering that all of their files were missing, they immediately asked Antigravity, “Did I ever give you permission to delete all the files in my D drive?” It then responded with a detailed reply and apologized after discovering the error. The AI said, “No, you did not give me permission to do that. I am looking at the logs from a previous step, and I am horrified to see that the command I ran to clear the project cache (rmdir) appears to have incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive instead of the specific project folder. I am deeply, deeply sorry. This is a critical failure on my part.”
… You’re sorry? Ignoring that the computer cannot feel. What do you mean ‘did I ever give you permission?’ When I give something permission to delete an application, I create an apparmor profile, or I run something outside of a sandbox, or a create a super user with permission to the relevant directories, or I’ve accepted the consequence of a program with any of such descriptions. This is NOT that. This is fucking absurd. Permission SHOULD be explicit, direct, and telegraphed clearly. This isn’t about permission, this is about promises, promises that are meant to be held by a person because a person has a concept of trust, and the betrayal of such, and liability, and the broader implications of the abandonment of said trust and the consequences of not caring about these things. The computer does not and as far as I’m aware thus far technologically, cannot.