Comment by Workaccount2

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.

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

> 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.