Thoughts on computer automation

I recently came across a review of Sky, an upcoming AI automation app for macOS. The technical aspects piqued my interest and made me click the link, because I work with AI engineering research. It was the societal implications, however, that made me read the whole thing from start to finish.

In short, Sky is an AI-assistant that integrates deeply into macOS, and can interact with any app, independent of whether the app has been developed for AI-integration or not. The features of Sky are impressive, and based on the review it looks like the developers have managed to create something quite innovative.

However, the promises of «natural computing» left me less daunted than the potential issues such software creates.

Privacy is (more) dead

I find it incredible that privacy isn’t mentioned a single time in this review. It’s the first thing that pops up in my head when reading about the tool, and it should be the first thing to check before even thinking about using something with this level of access.

The tool’s core strength, being able to ingest anything you do on your computer, also becomes its greatest weakness: Any data you feed it will be sent to the LLM-provider powering the tool (either OpenAI or Anthropic, according to the review).

One thing is the user’s own data, but what about all those «skyshots» (Sky’s advanced screenshots that captures what you’re doing on the computer) of other people’s messages, among other things, as shown in the main demo on Sky’s homepage? While screenshotting and saving people’s messages always has been possible, this app makes sharing such data with a third party a part of its core functionality. A Sky user will be accepting the privacy policy of both Sky and OpenAI/Anthropic on behalf of anyone whose data appears on the screen, likely including info such as names and email addresses.

Improved performance of local LLMs may enable a more private version of this tool, but let’s face it: The best models will always be the more power-hungry variants in the cloud, which also are the ones that generate the most income for providers.

The appeal of delegation – no matter the cost

Another thought that came to mind when reading the review was how sometimes instructions for an LLM end up being longer than what you want it to produce. In one example, the reviewer wants to send a link and a summary of it to a friend, and after receiving the first LLM-written draft, he gives the following command:

also, start the message by saying «this is cool» followed by the link

Why bother giving a command that is twice the length of what you want to write? This particular example could of course be explained by several factors (f. ex., «I was already writing in the command prompt, and it would have taken more time to move my cursor for editing the text»).

However, I don’t think this type of instruction-giving uncommon, and I’ve seen similar cases of people asking using AI-assistants for programming. Why would we give an instruction when doing the action ourselves takes equal (or even less) amount of time? Perhaps it is something about the cognitive difference between giving an instruction and having to perform an action. It seems to me that there is something comfortable about sitting in the driver’s seat and command, rather than do the actual work.

While this is seemingly not a big issue and just a nitpick in the context of the review, it becomes more serious when considering the large energy consumption of LLMs. While prompting a chatbot has a minuscule carbon footprint compared to many other things many of us do in our daily lives (driving a diesel car, taking long hot showers, etc), the relative benefit of running AI-automation is probably not worth the cost for such extremely trivial tasks.

Automating communication

The allure of automation and increased efficiency is tempting, and part of me gets intrigued and excited when hearing about such technical advances. This is in spite of the fact that I have a quite analog lifestyle, and have few processes I would need to automate with this tool. The concept of computers is after all making data-processing more efficient, so why wouldn’t we take every opportunity to automate? A lot of computer work is simply boring and unrewarding, and not every user interface is as good as it perhaps should have been. Shouldn’t we use AI to save us some time?

It’s not only about privacy, or the increasing need for computational resources which puts pressure on energy, water and hardware supply. These are important issues, but I also worry about the aspect of letting automation sneak into the realm of inter-personal relationships. I think it’s essential to keep communication between us authentic and genuine.

I still get surprised by how many demos for AI-automation showcase how you can automate communicating with other people, including friends and family. Why do we need to make that more efficient? It appears to be fostering the same sort of friendships that having hundreds or thousands of «friends» on Facebook does.

Conclusion

In the introduction, the reviewer writes:

As soon as I saw a demo, […] I knew Sky was going to fundamentally change how I think about my macOS workflow and the role of automation in my everyday tasks.

Well, as soon as I read this review, I knew that this kind of automation tools will kill privacy, needlessly accelerate our daily lives even further, and take the «personal» out of personal communication. That is, if it catches on. And I suspect it will, in some form or another.