helpful analysis here from Meredith Whittaker and Udbhav Tiwari of Signal at last week’s 39th Chaos Computer Club congress
AI Agent, AI Spy #39C3: Power Cycles
was “a critical technical and political economy analysis of the new privacy crisis emerging from OS and application level AI agents, aimed at the 39C3 “Ethics, Society & Politics” audience.”
I particularly enjoyed the appeal to us in the linux dev community, and the ending part, excerpt from the transcript (hear the applause and feel the urgency of our situation)…
"In my view, the velvet glove coup we are witnessing represents a critical inflection point in the history of computing. And that’s what I hope we’ve made clear today. We are transitioning from the operating system as a set of tools under developer and user control that they and we can wield to get a job done to the operating system as a container for AI systems that monitor, predict, and act for you under the ultimate control of the companies and organizations that create them. And it’s this fundamental issue, this profound paradigm shift that I hope you all can focus on. I hope you can use your brilliance and good hearts and keen sense of justice in and around computers to take seriously to examine and to amplify. Please make the memes find the and responsibly publicize the exploits and help bring us back down to earth so there’s no plausible deniability. There’s no way to claim that the hype substitutes for the technical reality. This is the bigger task to keep us grounded and to use the map established in doing so to come up with real solutions beyond the harm reduction tourniquets that we also desperately need to keep afloat for the time being.
Thank you so much CCC. I love you.
Yeah. Thank you.
So, we ran right up against time, so we don’t have time for questions, but we’re here for the entire Congress. So, just come up and say hi. We’re really, really grateful that CCC exists and really, really grateful right now in the world, especially to be here with you all. Thank you so much"