Discussing the Balance of AI Benefits and Risks (Part 3)

Liability is a real thing for companies that cause harm to consumers. We need to impose that. I'm not trying to let anybody off the hook, but the solution is not to stop the technology and say, hey, we're not going to improve this. It's to say, hey, here are some of the challenges. Let's try to tackle these challenges. Meredith, in this best foot forward part of Neil's argument, he's making the case that the agents actually deliver a whole lot of good to individuals and empowerment and convenience, et cetera. Do you refute that piece of it? Again, setting aside the trade offs that you're talking about, do you think he's right, that they have a lot of benefits to deliver? I think, you know, look where they work as intended, which is not all the time. They are convenience tools. I don't think anyone's arguing against that. And again, agents is a very woolly term for coding. Agents are doing things that are very, very useful. But coding is a field where we have a huge amount of data and where it's objectively verifiable. Your code runs or it crashes your compiler and you can kind of get a sense of what's there and move on. I think when we're talking about these kind of consumer agents, which is where my concern is, because they are hollowing out signals ability to provide PRIV by demanding or coercing data access in ways that are, I think, frankly, architecturally irresponsible at a technical level, irrespective of the convenience of not having to do your own Christmas shopping, you're looking at a hollowing out of our fundamental cybersecurity architectures in a way that is, again, it is reconstituting more and more power and data access in the hands of the existing winners of the AI ecosystem. So you have agents who are sort of grabbing data from the application layer. You have agentic integrations that are, you know, you're becoming kind of the front end of the Internet, the interface of the Internet, making it harder and harder for independent website developers, independent application developers to have a place in that ecosystem. So sure, they can be convenient.