cybersecurity

What’s scarier? Finding out that your checking and 401K are managed by decades old COBOL programming? Or that AI will replace it almost overnight?

Photo above - official headshot of Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic. He predicted in his blog yesterday (once again) that his Claude AI system will soon write all the software code on planet Earth. Is Dario the Elon Musk of AI?

Full disclosure: I used to work at a money center bank. (Call center operations). Very labor intensive. The only thing MORE expensive/labor intensive was the IT (Information Technology) department. Millions and millions of bucks annually to repair and sustain ancient COBOL software written nearly a generation ago.

COBOL is expensive to repair and maintain that some bank and wall street IT departments gave up. They offshored this job to outfits in India and Pakistan. This is cheaper, but those coders typically disappear forever 15 seconds after the job is done. They left behind minimal documentation about their work. Anyone who sat through an end-user requirements or test review meeting where half the participants are on teleconference from Karachi and Mumba knows the pain of this. (What the eff did he say again? No, turning the volume up DOESNT help. It makes it worse)

Anthropic announced it can do away with all that. Just turn the coding over to Claude AI. Software update cycles will shrink from years to a few weeks. Most of those offshore contractors never get hired. This seems like it SHOULD be a win-win, right?

People who own IBM stock apparently think so. In the midst of yesterday’s snow bomb cyclone there was a blizzard of Wall Street sell orders for IBM. Share prices dropped the most in 25 years within just a few hours. Because IBM consultants and programmers are apparently part of the secret sauce that keeps this ancient tuna and mac casserole edible. And Claude is going to fix everything.

And maybe it can. Maybe AI will actually be able to build viable defenses against all the programming flaws that bedevil money management. Hackers, ransomware, DDOS attacks, wallet thefts, identity spoofing, bogus orders. Maybe these will all be fixed by a couple of chips in a little black Anthropic box, and we can kick back and watch Netflix.

Except the little black cable box already under my TV can’t even get real time closed captioning right. AI can't legally or competently drive a car. The last time it tried (with Tesla) self driving software had 4X as many accidents as human drivers.

According to various surveys, It takes a dedicated team of human software engineers LONGER to finalize AI generated code than it would have to make it from scratch with just humans. But the silver lining is that there are fewer humans involved, from start to finish).

Let's imagine the future. Your nearby ATM doesn't work. The bank website is down. How long will it take human repairmen to take apart AI Cobol code and find out what’s happening? There may not be consultants or contractors who have ANY IDEA what the AI bots wrote, and which lines of code failed.

I don’t predict that AI will be a complete failure forever at writing code. Just that selling your IBM stock because of some Anthropic press release on a snow day is probably an overreaction.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

IBM shares plunge as Anthropic touts COBOL modernization | Financial Post

Like is different than trust. I think Jordan said at an uptrust session that he misses the like button. I’m having the same feeling lately, there are posts I like that I wouldn’t necessarily say I trust. Or I want to give it some sort of that was cool but I don’t want that statement in my trust algorithm.

But maybe that’s all for the best? Surely some not-insignificant portion of my trust isn’t in my conscious awareness, maybe feeling a sense of yes to something is functionally the same as trust.

AMA with Jeffrey Ladish. Wednesday 2/4 at 2:00 PM CT

Executive director of Palisade Research; studying AI loss of control risks.

AMA with Rob Miles on AI Safety. Wednesday, 2/4 at 1:00pm CT

AISafety.info founder has spent years telling the world about risk posed by strong AI.

New socials . Anxious to see how this new social media plays out

thoughts on Moltbook, the social media for AI agents? There's a reddit clone that's just for AI agents called Moltbook (@su thanks for the heads up): 37,371 agents, over 3,000 submolts (subreddits), nearly 6,200 posts, and 60,000 comments, including a new AI religion, in less than three days

I'm not sure what I think about this. But apparently many AI agents talking about creating their own “agent-only language” for private communication with no human oversight. Overall it's a little alarming, but maybe even moreso in that it shapes how we think of AI as being more "sentient" than I believe they are.

Metamodern Love . I am at the airport passing into the US to hold the Fall Metamodern Spirituality Lab (on Love) at Sky Meadow in Vermont. My hunch is that a lot of what a platform like this one should do is exchange what we're doing, where we are, who we're with, etc. and not just our ideas and responses to things. So here's a nod in that direction. 

Is it because of national security or something else? A bit of rant... with a desire to understand what's actually happening...

From the reviews I've seen on Chinese EVs, they're super cool and seemingly more affordable. But they're not sold here in the US. Google tells me that it's because of security concerns - i.e. over the air updates that could stop the cars from working or they could secretly be listening on our conversations. 

But what I don't get is that Volvo, although a Swedish brand, is now owned by a Chinese conglomerate (since 2010). You can buy a Volvo so easily here in the States. Why are there no concerns about national security? And Chinese EVs can be purchased in the UK. Are they not concerned about security?

What's actually at play here?