Organize and delegate, not just replace yourself

I watch in horror as people around me use AI in an absolutely unsafe way.

People give full access to their devices. The AI tools can use browsers (with all accounts), SMS, emails, bank apps. Once I saw somebody allow AI to attach by SSH to a production server! And nobody sees the problem with this.

What is the problem? You give control of all your digital life to someone else. He can send the wrong email to your boss (from your name!), he can spend all of your money. And you can’t control this.

It’s insane to give your phone or your laptop with work access to a kid. You care about the data it contains. He can delete everything, or break something else. Why is AI treated differently?

I don’t have the answer. Maybe this is because people don’t treat AI as a person. But it’s wrong. Intelligence (even primitive) has agency (the ability to act). So, he can hurt you (either by accident or by design).

My approach is to treat AI as a person/agent. He can be a personal assistant, a programmer, and a researcher. But all of them must have their own space. Their own email address, their own accounts. If I need to grant access to my calendar, I just share it with the assistant. I don’t share full access, but only the needed calendars or events. My github agent doesn’t have access to all my github, but only access to push to allowed repos. And every agent has their own VMs and doesn’t have access to the host machine. Just like a real person.

In this approach I am a CEO in a company of agents. I need to organize and delegate, but not to replace myself. This is my current strategy.

I’m sure there are a lot of interesting ways to use AI, not only an agentic approach, but we need to care about privacy when developing and using them