To some extent, yes. Government in particular. Both of them "close the loop" in the sense that they are self-sustaining (corporations through revenue, governments through taxes). Some institutions can be self-sustaining, but many lack strong independent feedback loops. Legal systems are pretty much all dependent on a parent government, or very large corporate entities (think big multi-year contracts).

For those who are interested, I'm researching Land's main thesis that capitalism is AI: https://retrochronic.com

I second this

I'll admit I'm not up to speed on Claude Code, but can you get it to look at a company's job openings each day, and notify you whenever there's an opening in your town.

All without writing a single line of code or setting up a cron job manually?

I suppose it could, if you let it execute the crontab commands. But 2 months after you've set it up, can you launch claude code and just say "Hey, stop the job search notifications" and have it know what you're talking about?

This is a trivial example. People are (attempting to) use it for more significant/compex stuff.

You don't need to give OpenClaw access to personal stuff. Yes, people are letting it read email. Risky, but I understand. But lots of others are just using it to build stuff. No need to give it access to your personal information.

Say you want a bot to go through all the HN front page stories, and summarize each one as a paragraph, and message you with that once a day during lunch time.

And you don't want to write a single line of code. You just tell the AI to set it all up.

No personal information leaked.

Account created a few minutes ago.

Incorrectly quotes me and executes a strawman attack.

The article doesn't really list any cool things people are using it for.

> "Forget bots messing with Github and posting to social media." Why should we forget that?

Go back 20 years, and if HN existed in those days, it will be full of "Forget that peer to peer is used for piracy. Focus on the positive uses."

The web, and pretty much every communication channel in existence magnifies a lot of illegal activity (child abuse, etc). Should we singularly focus on those?

That's a total mischaracterization. OP is saying there are no safer fireworks, so some damage will be done, but until someone develops safer and better fireworks, people will continue to use the existing ones

Don't conflate "fun" with "useful".

This is more like driving a car with little safety in the early days. Unsafe? For sure. People still did it. (Or electric bikes these days).

Or the early days of the web where almost no site had security. People still entered their CC number to buy stuff.

I mean, yeah, if you specifically like lighting off fireworks at the gas station, you should buy your own gas station, make sure it's far away from any other structures, ensure that the gas tanks and lines are completely empty, and then do whatever pyromanic stuff you feel like safely.

Same thing with OpenClaw. Install it on its own machine, put it on its own network, don't give it access to your actual identity or anything sensitive, and be careful not to let it do things that would harm you or others. Other than that, have fun playing with the agent and let it do things for you.

It's not a nuke. It can be contained. You don't have to trust it or give it access to anything you aren't comfortable being public.

>> Security vulnerabilities are bad but the blast radius is limited to the person who gets pwnd

No? Via prompt injection an attacker can gain access to the entire machine, which can have things like credentials to company systems (e.g. env variables). They can also learn private details about the victim’s friends and family and use those as part of a wider phishing campaign. There are dozens of similar scenarios where the blast radius reaches well beyond the victim.

It’s like money laundering, but now responsibility laundering.

Anthropic released Claude saying “hey be careful. But now that enables the masses to build OpenClaw and go “hold my bear”. Now the masses people using OpenClaw had no idea what responsibility they should hold.

I think eventually we will have laws like “you are responsible for your AI’s work”. Much like how driver is (often) responsible for car crashes, not the car companies.

This is just the price of being on the bleeding edge.

Unfortunately, prompt injection does strongly limit what you can safely use LLMs for. But people are willing to accept the limitations because they do a lot of really awesome things that can't be done any other way.

They will figure out a solution to prompt injection eventually, probably by training LLMs in a way that separates instructions and data.

Would they? I don't think anyone cares about security.

This is genuinely the only way to do it now in a way that will not virtually guarantee some new and exciting ways to subvert your system. I briefly toyed with an idea of giving agent a vm playground, but I scrapped it after a while. I gave mine an old ( by today's standards ) pentium box and small local model to draw from, but, in truth, the only thing it really does is limit the amount of damage it can cause. The underlying issue remains in place.

The only remaining risk? Considering wide range of bad actors and their intent, stealing your API keys is the last thing I'd worry about. People ended up in prison for things done on their computers, usually by them.

In America, any rando can build and fly an ultralight, no pilot license needed, no medical, no mandatory inspection of the ultralight or anything like that. I guess the idea is that 250 lbs (plus pilot) falling from the sky can't do that much damage.

Flight / aerospace is probably one of the worst analogies to use here!

As you say, it is one of the most regulated industries on earth. Versus whatever AI is now - regulated by vibes? Made mass accessible with zero safety or accountability?

> And universally across the globe societies have decided

No. Nobody decided anything of the sort about the wright brothers first plane. If they had, planes would not exist.