This is an extremely short-sighted and surface-level take.

Regarding what is available, imagine a system with reports and dashboards showing a timeline of which application was in focus and for how long, metrics on "activity" like keypresses and mouse clicks, periods of inactivity, lists of websites visited, whether you are joining scheduled zoom meetings, whether your camera was on, when you badged into and out of the office, periodic photos being taken from your webcam, geolocation on where you sign in from, and I could go on.

Most of these things are available bundled with most of the business Microsoft subscriptions while other telemetry comes from other tools or homegrown sources and is available to managers and IT staff on demand. Now, most of the time no one was really looking at most of this unless they had a reason to, and while I am no longer in this end of things since LLMs have reached this stage of maturity, I can imagine they are now being tasked with constantly watching for patterns in worker activity which deviate from the expected norm and are fully capable of notifying your manager automatically along with a detailed analysis of your activity.

The thing to understand is that the modern office is a veritable panopticon.

This is the fruition of Microsoft's dream, since it's the most obvious way to drive copilot usage in a way that A) burns mad tokens, B) is actually useful to paying customers.

Though, I have to wonder if distracting leadership with shit like this will be bad for business in the long-term. Both because leadership will fail to do their jobs, being too busy playing peeping tom on employees, but also because it takes their eyes off the prize - measuring the things that make money.

Even during the craze, I never understood why anyone would install a self-monitoring digital surveillance and tracking system in their own home.

Except that due to a bias toward agreeability what actually happens is that it will subtly affirm all of your preconceived notions.

That may be true but this is spoken is if that is a good thing and not going to become a gigantic albatross around their neck.

Considering Richard Dawkins has recently succumbed to the same delusion it is a reminder that no matter how intelligent someone may otherwise be, we are all human and have certain tendencies and blind spots; anthropomorphizing non-entities being one of those.

Richard Dawkins is 85 to be fair, just like Bernie Sanders is 84 when he made similar comments.

The other guy worked on Google's AI safety team where one would expect he'd have a basic grasp of how the technology works before making outlandish claims.

One phenomenon that spooks me is when intelligent people believe in idiotic things.

It makes me wonder if there's a wrong turn in the road that I too might fall in the same pit.

Vigilance is warranted, I think.

I can't find it right now, but something came up a few years ago (probably on HN) about highly intelligent people being more adept at making up arguments to rationalize beliefs and actions that they had taken for other reasons entirely.

Sort of makes sense that wielding a more complex mind would offer more complex ways to go wrong, doesn't it?

And on balance, it also can mean that they make connections and see truth where others only see the facade. Both statements can (and are true) because highly intelligent people are still just people. Some people’s “delusions” are absolutely correct, and others “facts” are nothing more than anecdotes told to convince themselves of what they want to believe.

Sounds more like “intelligence” isn’t the only defining metric for such behavior to occur in people, because that describes a lot of less intelligent people too. Though, I suspect highly intelligent people are at least somewhat more likely to end up on the “correct” side of the facts.

As someone who watched one of their heros fall for some stupid cult like thing ten years ago and wondered the same thing. Then many years later fell for some dumb stuff. The answer is you probably will. Try to stay intellectually flexible, it'll be okay.

I am afraid of that, I wasn't joking.

I have seen people I consider as much smarter than me fall for some very idiotic things. I certainly don't consider myself immune.

I think that the advice to try being intellectually flexible is a good one. Strive to learn new things, expose yourself earnestly to ideas that challenge your beliefs, exercise empathy, etc

I can't think of a single thing that I would want this doing for me. If it's important, it goes nowhere near something like OpenClaw.

Mythos is another grand slam by the Anthropic marketing team.

They issue a provocative public statement dressed up as a safety advisory and then sit back while the media and various industries (who for some reason take this all at face value) generate them tens of millions of dollars in free publicity through their own overreactions.

I would hope most people can recognize that someone trying to sell you something might be among the least trustworthy sources about that thing.

Almost certainly referring to cheating software.