Posted on 02/20/2026 6:16:03 AM PST by aquila48
ZDNET's key takeaways
Agentic AI technology is marked by a lack of disclosure about risks.
Some systems are worse than others.
AI developers need to step up and take responsibility.
Agentic technology is moving fully into the mainstream of artificial intelligence with the announcement this week that OpenAI has hired Peter Steinberg, the creator of the open-source software framework OpenClaw.
The OpenClaw software attracted heavy attention last month not only for its enabling of wild capabilities -- agents that can, for example, send and receive email on your behalf -- but also for its dramatic security flaws, including the ability to completely hijack your personal computer. Given the fascination with agents and how little is still understood about their pros and cons, it's important that researchers at MIT and collaborating institutions have just published a massive survey of 30 of the most common agentic AI systems.
The results make clear that agentic AI is something of a security nightmare at the moment, a discipline marked by lack of disclosure, lack of transparency, and a striking lack of basic protocols about how agents should operate.
(Excerpt) Read more at zdnet.com ...
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*Some of these software tools offer no way to stop a given agent from running.
Alibaba's MobileAgent, HubSpot's Breeze, IBM's watsonx, and the automations created by Berlin, Germany-based software maker n8n, "lack documented stop options despite autonomous execution," said Staufer and team.
"For enterprise platforms, there is sometimes only the option to stop all agents or retract deployment."
Finding out that you can't stop something that is doing the wrong thing has got to be one of the worst possible scenarios for a large organization where harmful results outweigh the benefits of automation."
Retail is using AI and it’s a pain in the neck.
and mostly spam and slop, AI is garbage, it interferes way more than doing any good.
I have watch people swear by it only to see their already mediocre products just get worse.
AI makes poor performance worse and just gets in the way of good performance.
Shut it ALL down! The negatives of AI outweigh the plusses...this is going to take us down a path that cannot be stopped if it’s not stopped before it goes any further! Technology/progress is not always GREAT! You can’t even make a phone call to a business today without the stress/anxiety/irritation/frustration of dealing with it and never receiving any answers to your questions - hanging up in disgust. If not stopped, we’ll all need Galt’s Gulch to run to! WHERE is OUR John Galt? Elon Musk is NOT the answer!
The AI world risks becoming an adversarial system where defending against intentionally negative or outright malicious agent behavior becomes an absolute necessity
heads up
I went to use Yandex to do a search for Retail AI and it said it thought I was a robot.
I had to switch from Google searches to DuckDuckGo because Google was sure I was a robot.
As a blogger, I have to come up with lots of quotes.
“Retail is using AI and it’s a pain in the neck.”
Kindly give an example or two, please.
Back in the day we called these Viruses, worms, and malicious programs. Killed them by stopping system services.
should still work
The fear is a rogue AI agent that could bring the Internet to its knees globally.
Nobody posted a picture of Agent Smith of the Matrix.
Try to resolve something....After getting junk responses, they finally gave me a real live human being to take care of the problem..And yes...they did resolve a very minor problem.
From what I’ve read, grok is the best of them.
But the most important thing is that AI agents are “trained” by usage. So if WE are using them to ask moral and political questions, or even just benign questions, that is counteracting their use by evildoers. Based on what I (think I) know, I would encourage everyone to use them instead of search engines. Got a tech question? Ask an AI. Want to know how to change your oil? Ask an AI. Need a recipe? Ask an AI. Want to know what Trump said today? Ask an AI. etc.
“I would encourage everyone to use them instead of search engines.”
Most search engines already default to the AI mode.
They put their AI answer at the top.
Google Gemini AI is very inaccurate.
The goal is Cyberdyne and Skynet level of performance.
“That said I wish we could turn back the clock to pre-AI days and never have humanity cross that line again.”
Sadly, I’m afraid that ship has sailed... and it’s quickly disappearing over the horizon. Even if we don’t do it, other countries,like China, surely will. In fact they’re ahead of us in that regard.
Look at what their robots can do today... The balance, agility, flexibility is simply amazing. And they don’t get tired, need lunch breaks, sleep, don’t ask for higher pay, don’t strike, aren’t moody, can have additional sensory perception (x-ray, infrared vision, ultrasound, etc), be much stronger than any human. This video showcase is from a celebration of their lunar new year earlier this month.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUmlv814aJo
And they’re making them look and feel more and more like humans. Meet sexy Moya, the newest release from a Chinese company called Droidup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPcnuym_JmY
Equip them with AI (which most likely they already have) and the ability to reason and solve problems, (i,e, cause and effect and logical thinking, which should be quite easy) and you have a truly superhuman.
The 64K question is will they be our slaves,or us theirs? Right now, I’m not at all sure. I think we’ll be more like their pets. They’ll feed us and keep us happy as long as we do some tricks and don’t misbehave too much.
What do you think?
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