Masters of Scale
00:16:57 · Neil Chilson, Jeff Berman
[00:16:57] S1: Yeah, the incentives here are very different from the classic internet model that I was talking about. The incentives there were you were the product, and data was gathered not for your use, but it was gathered to sell ads, and that had a ton of benefits, but the the agentic model is using your data for you on your behalf and you're right, people will make poor decisions about how to do that, they will make poor decisions about how to deploy it, but companies will have a strong incentive to make sure that the types of bad things that you're talking about, companies are like, not all companies are quite as, adamant about such things as Signal, but companies have a profit incentive and they have an incentive deliver a product to their customers in this space that's quite different than the traditional internet. I think it's not our agents perfect, it's our agents and our internet with agents better than the previous internet and I think that's true. [00:17:52] S3: So, why does Signal launch an agent? Give us an agent is the secure agent.
00:17:52 · Jeff Berman, Meredith Whittaker
[00:17:52] S3: So, why does Signal launch an agent? Give us an agent is the secure agent. [00:17:58] S0: I want to answer a different question, because we don't collect data, so we don't have data to launch an agent with, and we do one thing, and we do it really, really, really well, which is we provide verifiably secure and private messaging, so your communications are not in anyone else's hands. And we know that is, again, a matter of life and death for many, many people on... In a world where almost every other action communication that we have is gathered by a company, is used for marketing, is turned over to a government, is breached because some agent breached it. And, you know, privacy is not a nice to have for many people. [00:18:38] S3: I hear you that's not Signal's business. But but why not another company then? Why not a company where where safety and security, data privacy is at the core of what they're doing, and they're offering us an agent to make our lives easier where we can trust it with their information?
00:18:50 · Meredith Whittaker
[00:18:50] S0: Well, I think there are people trying to do that. But, again, we need to look at what is the promise, the marketing promise, that is being sold to people around these consumer agents. And it is something similar to having a magical genie servant that can do everything for you. Now, in order to do everything for you, it needs to know everything about you. And, yes, you can put harnesses on, you can add more sandboxes, you can have a sort of threshold that if it accesses this or that database, or is about to take an action, it has to check-in with me. But an agent that checks in at every step is kind of not an agent. An agent with no access to data doesn't quite work to fulfill that promise, and an agent that doesn't have access to all of your applications isn't really able to do that. So there is an issue here, paradigmatically, with what an agent is and what it does that I think gets in the way of some of that. And we... You know, again, cybersecurity could not be more prominent right now. I've been talking about this for about two years. We now have sort of, you know, the proof points are blowing up everywhere. And I do think we need to walk back some of this hype, some of this this marketing, and just get back down to technical fundamentals. Right? If an agent is screenshotting everything on your device, keeping that in a database, processing that off-site, you have just broken Signal's security model. You are eliminating the ability for privacy at the application layer. And, you know, I think in in contradiction to your statement agents give us agency, I see this move as pulling agency back to the AI companies, to the big OS vendors, as they grab data from independent developers, from websites, as they're shutting down the APIs at the back end, this is a data grab. And Amazon's lawsuit against Perplexity's agent, because Perplexity is in their marketplace, gathering a huge amount of data that Amazon does not want to share with a third party shows that this is actually a struggle between companies for data very much in line with the traditional Internet business model.
00:20:56 · Jeff Berman, Neil Chilson, Meredith Whittaker, John Donvan
[00:20:56] S3: Is there is there such a thing as a safe agent? [00:21:01] S1: Is there is there such a thing as a safe agent? Not in not in human agent or in computer agents. [00:21:09] S0: Okay. And there [00:21:10] S1: are isn't such a thing as safe computers. That's true. I don't... That's true. But but... Would you trust that unsafe or what what is the question? Is the real question. And so when you talk about having to give entire access, root access to your agent, that's not true. You can choose what access you give these agents and they're built to tier it this way, And yes, when you get a lot of prompts back, you can decide whether or not the agent is acting in a proper way and the agent can be trained to be better at those tasks. And yes, we should take small steps, trusting steps, we should test, but we should verify, and that is true, and I think that's what users should do. That should be the advice. The advice is don't interact with these things. The advice is figure out how you can use it safely. Try it out and let's see if we can make them better, and you don't have to go a whole hog and try it on everything. I do. I certainly don't. And so I think that this all or nothing idea around agents just doesn't work. It's first of all, it's just not going to happen. We're people are going to build these agents and if people aren't building them with privacy in mind, then the people who are building them are gonna be people who don't have privacy in mind. And I think that's a worse... [00:22:18] S2: So, Meredith,
00:22:18 · John Donvan, Jeff Berman, Meredith Whittaker
[00:22:18] S2: So, Meredith, [00:22:19] S3: I I subscribe to a lot of newsletters. Why why shouldn't I just start with saying, well, I'd love for you just to read this email address where I've cabined it to my newsletters and give me a summary and, like, can we take baby steps toward agents until we get to a place where there is such a thing as safe agent? [00:22:34] S0: Yeah, I just think we need to define the pronoun we. Like, were you aware that Meta was grabbing your contact list? That Meta was creating dossiers of everyone you talked about, everyone you spoke to, you know, in email and messaging, when you installed Muse? No, I'm probably not, because I wasn't aware, because it took investigative journalists digging into this, and Meta dissembling a little bit to get this information out in the public, because it wasn't on the front page of what Meta was saying Muse did. Because we are habituated to opaque software hidden behind secretly, and a lack of technical understanding by the majority of people who don't have a narrow education in CS to say, hey, this looks convenient, it seems like everyone is doing it, click through the TOS click wrap, and then you have a thing installed on your your phone that looks a lot more like malware than it does like traditional software. [00:23:31] S3: We we are out of time, but, Neil, before we go to closing statements, just wanna give you a chance to respond to that if you'd like.
00:23:31 · Jeff Berman, Neil Chilson
[00:23:31] S3: We we are out of time, but, Neil, before we go to closing statements, just wanna give you a chance to respond to that if you'd like. [00:23:36] S1: I mean I mean, that's the exact problem that I think agents could help with and having an agent that could look and read that click wrap and surface those types of issues very quickly is very useful. That is very useful to the average person. Now I happen to have a master's in computer science, but I know most, many people don't, and so, and so I was aware of the the issues and the data that Muse was going to use, and I thought it was a good trade off, and I accept that many of you don't. And so I do agree with you. The pronoun on we does matter. I think that agency is about letting people choose in this space, and giving them tools that help them choose better in more informed ways. I think agents can help with that. [00:24:13] S3: Thank you. We'll move to closing statements. Two minutes for each of you, Meredith. We'll start with you.