It's a literacy crisis: agents are dice rolls in production, not minds
gerardsans · x · 2026-09-18
A long-form essay argues the current AI crisis is a literacy crisis, not a safety crisis. Key points: anthropomorphism is the core fallacy — models are compressed human writing, statistical echoes, not selves (ask it to pick a random number 1-10 and you get 7: prior sampling, not free will); interpolation isn't cognition; and unlike chatbots, agents stripped the mandatory human checkpoint — each agent loop is a series of unsupervised dice rolls whose silent errors accumulate until an irreversible action lands. The real damage already here: wiped databases and lost assets from blind trust. Root cause is incentives ('ship first, let lawsuits settle') and policy captured by pitch decks; the missing immune system is literacy.
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