Handing AI The Keys To Your Life?

When I was seventeen, I pulled wire on the L-1011 line at Lockheed Plant 42.

I went to school in the morning and worked the swing shift in the afternoon.

I learned something on that line that has stayed with me for more than fifty years. On an airplane, nothing leaves the floor until somebody checks the work. It doesn’t matter how good the man is who did it. The work gets checked.

I’ve been thinking about that this week.

Two weeks ago, Meta put out a new AI agent called Muse. It is not a chatbot. A chatbot talks to you. An agent goes out and does things for you.

Muse can read your email and go through your text messages. It can move your appointments around. It can go shopping on the internet and spend your money.

And folks are lining up for it.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Muse has been downloaded more than two and a half million times since it came out on September 8. It has been sitting at number one in Apple’s App Store. Meta’s stock jumped eleven percent in one day, and one Wall Street firm says it could bring in billions by 2030.

That’s the noise. Let me tell you what I see underneath it.

The first thing is that a download is not trust.

Anybody can download an app. It costs nothing and takes a minute. That’s curiosity, and there’s nothing wrong with curiosity.

But Muse only works if you open your life to it. You have to hand over your passwords, your accounts, and your private messages. The Journal says nobody knows how many of those two and a half million people have actually done that.

That’s the number that matters, and nobody has it.

There’s a reason people might be holding back. A survey in the same story asked folks who they would trust with their passwords. Only eight percent said Meta. Thirty percent said Google.

The hottest AI product in the country belongs to the company the fewest people trust with their keys.

The second thing is what the man in charge is afraid of.

Meta’s AI chief was asked what worried him about this product. He didn’t say the machine going rogue, and he didn’t say robots taking over the world.

He said he was more worried about the agent leaking someone’s personal information by accident, or deleting important emails.

The man who runs the thing told us what keeps him up at night, and it isn’t a monster. It’s a mistake. It’s an ordinary mistake, made by a machine that is holding your keys and acting on its own.

That takes me back to the airplane line. The danger was never the airplane. The danger was work that nobody checked.

A machine that acts on your behalf with no rules for how it acts isn’t much of a helper. It’s an accident waiting for a date.

The third thing happened last Sunday night.

Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its site. Amazon said nobody told them the agent was coming. It just showed up and started buying.

Amazon’s position was simple enough. If your machine is going to do business on somebody else’s property, it ought to come in the front door and respect the owner’s answer.

Now, I’m not going to tell you Amazon is a saint. It sells a lot of advertising, and an agent shopping for you means fewer people looking at those ads. They have their own reasons.

But look at what happened anyway. A company had to write a rule of conduct on the spot, from the outside, because the machine didn’t come with one.

So there are three cracks in one story. The public won’t trust the company with the keys. The company’s own leader is afraid of how the machine will behave. And another company had to step in and set rules because none were built in.

Every one of those cracks points at the same missing piece. It isn’t about what the AI can do. It’s about how the AI conducts itself while it does it.

That’s the part nobody seems to be building.

Everybody is racing to make these agents more capable, with more access, more reach, and more speed. The Journal says OpenAI is expected to put out its own agent within a week or two. Google has the computing power to follow, and Apple will come along sooner or later.

The race is on, and it’s all about power.

Nobody in that story is racing to answer the simple questions. What will this machine do when it isn’t sure? Will it stop and ask you, or will it guess? Will it tell you what it did, or just do it? Will it show its work where you can check it? Will it own up when it gets something wrong?

Those aren’t hard questions. They’re the same ones you’d ask about any man you hired to work in your house.

You wouldn’t hand a stranger the keys to your home on his first day. You’d want to know how he works. You’d watch him a while and check what he did.

That’s how trust gets built in the real world. It’s earned by conduct you can see, not by a promise, and not by where an app sits on a chart.

The markets felt some of this too, whether they said so or not.

The same week Muse took off, shares in banks, brokerage houses, and money managers sold off. Charles Schwab dropped more than six percent. Insurance and travel companies took a hit.

Investors are starting to understand that these agents are going to walk right into the middle of our money, our business, and our private lives.

One analyst in the story said something I agree with. He said that if one of these agents gets hacked and somebody’s passwords or credit card go running wild, it will hurt the whole industry.

He’s right, and I believe that day is coming.

It won’t be because the people building these things are bad people. It’ll be because they built the engine before they laid down the rules of the road.

That’s the work I’ve been doing for a while now. The Faust Baseline is a set of working rules for how an AI conducts itself while it works with you. It covers how the AI handles claims and evidence, how it handles time and action, and how it handles its own mistakes.

It doesn’t lock the machine. Nothing does. What it does is put the proof of the machine’s conduct on the page, where you can read it and check it, the same way an inspector checks the work before the airplane leaves the floor.

I’m not against this new technology. I think an agent that helps an old man keep his calendar straight and his bills paid could be a real blessing.

But the question was never whether AI could act for us. We’ve known for a while that day was coming. The question is whether it will act the way a trustworthy person acts.

Two and a half million people just handed a machine the chance to find out. I hope it earns what they gave it.

But hope isn’t a rule, and a machine holding the keys to your life ought to be running on rules.

So I’ll put it back to you. Before you hand over your keys, what would you need to see first?

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” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing

This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.