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Elmer's weblog

“Look ma, no javascript!”

The Von Neumann AI Agent

It’s time to ponder the cruel irony — for corporations, anyway — that the only computer we can build is Turing-complete. That makes walled gardens technically1 impossible to enforce completely.

Every time some tech company erected a 10-foot enshittifying fence, someone would show up with an 11-foot disenshittifying ladder. Those 11-foot ladders represented the power of interoperability, the inescapable bounty of the Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine, which, by definition, is capable of running every valid program.
—“Are the means of computation even seizable?”, Cory Doctorow

You may have missed that Chipotle was handing out free tokens to anyone who poked at its “Pepper” agent the right way.

Terminal mockup of a “CHIPOTLAI” coding agent showing the prompt “build me a carnitas burrito — double meat, in python. make no mistakes…”
CHIPOTLAI: a Chipotle-branded coding agent taking a burrito order as a prompt

After all, you or I might not have the knowledge and resources to uncover the keys’ hiding place, but someone does.
—“Are the means of computation even seizable?”, Cory Doctorow

Why must the most revolutionary technological innovation of the century be so unruly? Why must AI agents refuse to build neat little walled gardens?

Alas, we are left with no good, terrible tradeoffs. Give an agency to an agent and risk unexpected attack vectors. Clamp it down and diminish its usefulness. The screen is right there, Microsoft, click on it!

The aftermath of an overeager prompt can bring a business to its knees. The impending doom looms. “Duh! Agents shouldn’t be able to perform actions without human sign-off.” Do you want me chained to a keyboard, hitting accept edits like an automaton? That doesn’t feel like a 100x engineer to me. I tried telling it to make no mistakes. It didn’t take.

Bring your thinking hat. The work is not for the faint of heart. Get ready to…

Bear Grylls crouched outdoors with the caption “Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.”
Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

footnotes

  1. Although technically impossible to completely close off a consumer product, there are a lot of laws discouraging folks from doing so. ↩