>How? What is the law for this? It's not defined who is responsible for agents. What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad
The law could be whatever we wanted it to be.
Your example scenarios are hardly compelling reasons that we should just accept the status quo.
We don't need to allow companies to have no liability in accepting automated electronic claims of anything from anyone in the interest of making more ad revenue faster.
Fantastic, your wish is granted, the monkey's paw bends one finger.
"I do not accept this" does nothing, look at the current power situation of the big data companies, look at the economical incentives, will you personally go out and do something in the coming weekend that will change anything regarding this question? Next weekend? Who is going to do this?
If you can't answer that, you have to go with the assumption of status quo because it doesn't seem like your world is happening.
What an annoying way to answer someone. "Hey you can't do anything, so might as well not talk at all".
You came to a discussion board, one about founding and building. You can disagree with people, but to act like the status quo is some immovable rock? I admit, it's difficult. But the world changes and can be changed.
I think this is the single most annoying thing about this site – the pervasive belief that anything that is happening must be allowed to continue happening, because if it's happening it's somehow good or right or at least unstoppable.
This goes further than a simple aversion to regulation. It's a kind of defeatism on a scale I've never seen anywhere else, bar maybe very nihilist circles or angsty teenagers.
Making up scenarios that have no grounding to reality does not move a discussion forward.
If I start talking about space unicorns arriving to earth and giving people UBI by thursting their horns up peoples asses, it does not move the conversation forward meaningfully to any insight.
I would love if there was engagement that was grounded in incentives, if you can see a way out of this mess by realistic action, that would be meaningful.
I’m assuming you’re American and your low probability for laws making meaningful changes is therefore rational given your broken political system.
But that doesn’t mean other countries could not act. For all its faults, age verification of social media is a clear example of a policy that looked very unlikely a few years ago, and yet will likely have a material impact on the lives of young people in Australia and some European countries.
Making networks liable for fraudulent ads, or even placing a small duty of care on those who display ads would be politically popular in much of the developed world. I don’t see it as at all unrealistic that a populist of the left or right would not try and implement this in the next 10 years.
Sure. Age verification is however a massive celebration here at big tech. Many companies have really struggled with getting people to upload their IDs/passports as this has been seen as as integrity violation. It's a base for a successful internal profile for ads.
Now this was handed to the companies on a silver platter through litigation.
I also find it near-impossible to reliably get Claude to write text the way I want it to without continually reverting back to Claudespeak overwrought word salad. Plus the same sort of hedging/over-anticipation of future hypothetical edge cases, etc.
It's been much more reliable to just have Codex rewrite all the prose at the end of a Claude task than to keep futzing with my prompts/memory/agents.md (On certain issues I can't get Codex to be as thorough on the actual implementation, c'est la vie.)
There's nothing an actively-aiming-to-harm-others-for-their-own-gain person loves more than someone else deciding to stop trying because it's 'rigged.' The assholes are internally motivated to continue to being assholes. That takes continual active resistance.
Health access, for instance, improved as a result of one set of votes. Lifetime maxes are gone. There is improved access to non-employee plans.
It didn't stop inflation of health plan costs or medical treatment in general. One might think that means its worth voting for people pledging to make further large-scale changes to address those things.
And meanwhile, the assholes have been campaigning on the opposite for more than a decade: try to make the access worse again by trying rhetorical tricks to say that the one caused vs failed to fix the other. That'll let some rich people get even richer.
That's a real difference for many millions of people.
Neither party is perfect. Welcome to adulthood. Shitty compromises are generally all you get.
By all means, work on structural things to encourage more parties to exist and flourish.
The 'both sides are the same' actually is though. They never encourage 'take this behavior, vote this person' just 'both sides are the same' 'it's pointless' 'voting doesn't matter' 'voters have no impact'.
Claiming that both parties have more in common than they're given credit for is very different from throwing ones hands in the air and giving up on voting.
I personally see our two parties today and fighting for the same principles while landing on different specific policies. That doesn't mean I don't vote.
A lot of these trends go back to Reagan so "25 years ago" isn't too long ago to have shaped those trends.
But Clinton was a bit of a correction—not perfect by any means—to Reagan, who lit a bunch of gasoline on the "don't tax and DO spend" fire. Too bad even Reagan would look like some sort of TDS cuck RINO to the current conservatives...
So if one guy figures out some rhetorical tricks to convince an entire generation that ACTUALLY tax cuts will INCREASE revenue and HELP the deficit... while meanwhile massively increasing it under his administration... that guy still has responsibility for it decades later. (Throw in the hollywood greed-is-good-everyone-screw-over-your-neighbor-and-do-cocaine enthusiastic adoption of the era for good measure.)
I prefer to assign responsibility to the voters of the previous 25 years, just like I would to any other decision maker of any other organization trying to blame someone from 25 years ago.
Let's actually compare the size of the wars of both parties for the last 40 years. Let's compare the spend-vs-tax changes for both.
If you can't be honest that some folks out there are, in fact, pushing much worse agendas than others... then how do you hope to convince anyone to evaluate if anyone else is gonna actually do better than either? You can't easily have those critical thinking skills without noticing the differences in the two current parties...
Is your argument that one party overspends worse than the other? That certainly is true, though how many externalities are included would be up for debate. Regardless though, my problem is with the over spending, not with which is party over spends less.
You said it wasn't a "one party is the problem" situation.
But how can you conclude that if you don't have those numbers to give me?
Switching gears to externalities seems like a bit of a dodge unless you are super confident that those externalities are more significant than the bad things you predict happening in the future due to the debt.
Don't you need to look at the numbers to justify that claim? Maybe one party has added 30T and another has added 5T to the debt since Carter. Maybe one has added 20T and the other added 18T. Those numbers would demand VERY different responses.
But saying "it's not one party" seems to assume a particular set of numbers. What are they?
Your argument is absurd. You seem to take issue with my arguments and the examples I gave and demand I owe you numbers and statistics. But you're making your own arguments ad though they are correct without providing your own data.
I think we even agree that one party will outspend the other. You're ignoring my entire point that running a deficit is the problem and both parties are guilty of doing it and both parties continue to push for even more spending on policies they happen to agree with.
You made the initial claim that it wasn't a "one party is the problem," shouldn't that be your own responsibility to substantiate?
"I think we even agree that one party will outspend the other."
I'd rephrase it to out-deficit the other because you could spend more AND bring in more revenue and improve the situation. If we do that, then yes, that's certainly my hunch, but I didn't pull any numbers. Maybe the covid-era timing of Trump-vs-Biden plays out wildly different, maybe some of the Obama-era stuff cost more than I'm recalling. Seems necessary to know to know if it's one party is MUCH better than the other or just one party is a bit better than the other.
>You're ignoring my entire point that running a deficit is the problem and both parties are guilty of doing it and both parties continue to push for even more spending on policies they happen to agree with.
My reason for asking for the data is that the best action to take depends on the magnitudes. If one party is dramatically better than the other then the most practical way of fixing your problem is likely to be do everything you can to get that party more power AND work to shift it into the positive vs try to burn both parties down.
You're still deflecting off my actual argument, latching onto only the first sentence, and demanding stats where none are needed.
I said its not a one party problem and then went on to very clearly explain that both parties overspend our income and run deficits. Are you refuting that? No exact stats are needed there because its common knowledge that we haven't run a balanced budget since Clinton was in office.
You seem to be arguing with a point that I never said. I didn't claim which party had spent more, for that I would have to double check the numbers and adjust for inflation.
I don't think there's much point in quibbling over which party has added more to the national debt. The point is that both parties have been irresponsible in different ways, and neither supports the policies necessary to balance the budget: tax increases and cuts to entitlements.
note how his second term is half what his first term was? Perhaps that's because his first term was about dealing with the GFC that occurred under Bush's watch. Obama's second term was about the same (in adjusted/2026 dollars) as Bush's second: it seems the high level of spending that Obama did was (a) to first clean up the GFC mess, and (b) paying for the military adventures kicked of by the GOP.
And notice how Clinton 1 was lower than that of the previous three GOP terms? And how Clinton 2 was even lower? See how under Bush it suddenly jumps?
To a certain extent Trump 1 and Biden had to deal with COVID, so there's some leeway there, but Trump 1 also saw a huge tax cut passed in 2019 (before COVID), so there was going to be deficits under his watch (and, surprise, the tax cuts did not 'pay for themselves'):
The two parties are not equivalent: one starts wars and gives taxes cuts to the rich, the other does not. Just about every major problem that the US has had to deal with over the last few decades has been started under GOP leadership.
I didn't post them because I didn't bother looking them up, and wanted the person making the claim to check into it. Thanks for actually sharing!
That presentation does support their claim that both parties need to get back to basics on that matter.
Though now that I'm a bit more invested, looking at deficit delta by year for each of those tells a bit more.
Bush's went up then started to fall until 2008. Obama inherited that mess and he+his Congress spent to get out of it then made it shrink continually until a bump back up in 2016. Trump increased the deficit every single year (and enormously so in 2020, another disaster response incident). It shrank back under Biden in 2021 and 2022 then ticked back up, Trumps' now got it trending back up again after a tiny decrease in 2025.
The thing that changes with that view is that Trump appears to be the big outlier here, who's never really managed to bring it down at all or even try. And there's a fun macro-trend of both of those Democrats only getting elected into shits-on-fire circumstances. Clinton didn't have the problem, maybe that's why he did better.
You didn't post them because you were arguing with a point I didn't make. I didn't say both parties spend just as much, I said both parties overspend and run deficits. The average person shouldn't need to fact check such an obvious statement.
Your attempts here to deflect all spending from the president in office to the party you disagree with is also a bit too obvious. You had no counter argument to my actual point and were instead fishing for me to provide exactly those numbers so you could do exactly this deflection.
Given that you wanted so badly for me to look up numbers, I'd love to hear you justify that running deficits is not a problem of only one party.
But you only have 2 parties. If you vote for the party that over spends less you show that this is an election winning strategy and will influence governing more.
There's no legal limitation on how many parties we have, we simply haven't moved past two main parties since Hamilton and Jefferson were after each other.
U popular opinion for sure, and I'm not even saying it as my view today, but there is argument to be made that we don't own anyone a vote and if both parties are terrible options we can walk away and engage elsewhere. If I really believed both parties were bad options, I'd focus on working with my local community as much as possible. If the federal government can't represent me in anyway then I'd be walking out of that system as much as possible.
The US also kept much higher marginal tax rates for a few more decades after that, which helped the common people by disincentivizing the post-Reagan short-term-financial-games profit-maximization and wealth-and-income-consolidation.
I feel like the earnings structure is quite different than it was post-war though. Today there's a larger difference between "income rich" and "capital rich" in terms of their options for avoiding tax incidence.
Like in 1947 a factory owner's profits would show up as high income. Today they wouldn't (money is in share prices and complex financial arrangements / borrowing). The high marginal rates hit the chief engineer instead, who actually works for a living.
Exactly the true wealth of America is no longer income or property its all shares. It could be argued the American 40T debt is pretty much because of tax avoidance due to hiding wealth in stocks and related possibilities.
Stock value is not real wealth. The stock value is a guess about future profits along the next 10 years. You can't give to workers guessed future wealth. It doesn't exists today.
No argument there, im simply making the observation that a lot of people are avoiding tax by hiding their wealth as shares and this is hurting the gov ability to tax and pay its debts.
Its a really tricky problem to solve. One simple solution would be to tax any loan secured by owned assets as regular income, though there may be situations that hits more average people, say if you take out a HELOC on your home.
It is pretty absurd that one can borrow against a mountain of owned stocks and live of the loan without it being considered income.
The error is to assume that there is wealth to tax. Imagine an island with 3 people, which produces 2 burgers a day, so the poorest one can't get a burger. Now the government taxes the richest person, and buys one burger. who lost the burger?
The burger is taken from the poorest person that was able to buy a burger. Now you have 2 people who cannot buy a burger.
This is why you cannot tax unrealized gains. You are sacking the poorest. Is not matter of how the government gets the money. The problem is that the government spends the money.
The poorest always pay all government spending. Always.
Seems like a good reason to figure out some additional soak-the-rich taxes! (Back in the 30s that was a slogan that Americans could rally behind..! Not so much right in the last several decades.)
But it's also disingenuous to claim that none of today's approaches would show up as high income. A lot of old money would be protected still, a lot of new-money would be hit.
Isn't it telling that there was so much massive development of American industry in the post-WWII era and yet there weren't any Musks or Bezos or Gates? A country that had minted tycoons like Getty and Rockefeller and Carnegie stopped for a while. A guy like Howard Hughes was involved in several areas of development but didn't touch the guys who came before him or after him overall...
> The US also kept much higher marginal tax rates for a few more decades after that
This is a common trope, but it ignores that at the time the tax code had loopholes that could smuggle a freight train full of gold bars. Instead of lower marginal rates, people were taking their real estate and personal vehicles and everything else as tax deductions, and then weren't paying the high marginal rates to begin with. The lowering of marginal rates came with the closing of most of those loopholes, which is why the change had no real effect on federal receipts as a percent of GDP, which has been in the same range since the end of WWII (and was much lower before it):
The thing that actually changed is that markets have consolidated a lot more than they were in the mid 20th century, and we have significantly more regulatory capture where e.g. corporations lobby to make their services required by law or to impede or prohibit new entrants to the market. Then consumers/workers have to pay more for those things while receiving nothing of value in return. Corporations take more money and it comes from labor.
Increasing the tax rate doesn't fix that because you'd still have workers paying the high prices to corporations even if the government subsequently took more of the money.
What happens if you have to buy a product from a monopolist so they currently take your last $100, and then the government comes and says they have to pay 80% of it in tax? Best case the government gives the money directly to you, but then there is still a monopoly, so they just raise the price by the amount it takes to extract all of your money again. Worst case, the money doesn't go to you, it goes to some cronies who will now be using it to lobby to increase the amount you pay, and have just demonstrated that they're more politically connected than the original corporations.
To actually fix it you have to get back to competitive markets, efficiency and low barriers to entry.
soooo wouldn't that be exactly the "deskilling" being discussed here, and isn't that deskilling concerning for money-handling firms?
having seen both (a) mission-critical human-built systems become nightmares for maintainability and extensibility and (b) bleeding-edge ai coding agents confidently and quickly fix a wrong problem in the face of an issue (or fix it in a slightly wrong way), I remain skeptical that this great de-skilling will all be perfectly fine.
of course, if you aren't looking at the code you won't fucking know until someone yells...
I disagree with several premises of the article. There is not going to be human led investigations of outages. People do not need to train on easy outages to be able to handle hard outages. Even if you wanted to train people on easy outages AI makes it easier than ever to setup up real world like issues to replace the need for real world experience. I also disagree in labeling it deskilling when it is a reallocation of skills to what is actually needed.
>concerning for money-handling firms
The real world is robust. It's okay for money handling code to have bugs. It's not the end of the world and AI will be able to have a lower bug rate than humans.
> The real world is robust. It's okay for money handling code to have bugs.
This is true. The world will go on. But your business will lose more money than it gained by not paying attention to the code. It will lose money because it will have to compensate customers or lose customers. That's how the world maintains it's robustness.
It's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure Appearance Manager and the corresponding unreleased-but-leaked Hi-Tech theme was 8.5-or-so-and-up-only, which means I must reject 7.6 on aesthetic grounds ;)
How many of these "we sandboxed it and said not to do Y, but then it went and did it!" stories would you consider necessary to disprove that?
It may be good at following rules 99.99% of the time but if someone launches a million times more parallel agents than they would hire humans, it might still be much worse in practice...
"We've been told we must find an effective drug candidate here, and to follow this process for evaluating the quality of the candidate, but actually we could subtly change the analysis like this to make this candidate look favorable enough..."
(And then compare that to deterministic algorithms...)
We are not perfect as human beings, and we can’t expect AI, which is modeled after us to be perfect too. This fear of AI is irrational.
The argument here is that AI can run permutations faster than any human can. And, feeding it a company’s proprietary data about what worked, what did not, how it worked and so on can be invaluable at accelerating the discovery process of new drugs.
> They can put it onto robots / automatic labs, so this step is easily solvable. Humans in a modern lab are largely unnecessary. Just look at China.
You can automate the setup and mechanical process. You could increase the physical capacity for parallel tests. You could increase the rate of acquiring raw materials.
But how much you cut down the time depends on how much of the trial-and-error feedback loop depends on feedback and iteration vs cast a wider initial net.
(One of the interesting things to me about the dominant software development agent pattern across all of Claude, Codex, and Cursor is that the approach is still extremely local and iterative, human-mimicking, rather than big-brain-one-shotting a novel or perfectly-fit-for-purpose software design. The performance of the agents on the initial "jump to conclusions" step does not appear superhuman in the same way that the speed-of-iteration is clearly superhuman.)
The law could be whatever we wanted it to be.
Your example scenarios are hardly compelling reasons that we should just accept the status quo.
We don't need to allow companies to have no liability in accepting automated electronic claims of anything from anyone in the interest of making more ad revenue faster.
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