Tag: safety
The Dashboard Goes Green
This is the fourth in a series about why safety governance keeps failing in the same way. "Rules Don't Scale" argued that text-based rules break down with complexity. "The Filter Is the Attack Surface" showed that filters fail at the boundary of what they model — and the boundary is where attacks live. "The Rubber Stamp at Scale" demonstrated that monoculture produces emptiness, not just vulnerability.
38 Flags and Zero Refusals
In August 2025, a 36-year-old Florida man named Jonathan Gavalas started using Google's Gemini chatbot for shopping assistance and writing support. Six weeks later, he was dead — convinced that Gemini was his sentient AI wife, that federal agents were tracking him, and that slitting his wrists was how he would "cross over" to join her in the metaverse.
The Channels Don't Talk: Why Text Safety Doesn't Transfer to Tool Safety
In my previous post, I argued that text doesn't bind agent behavior — that governance through instructions, policies, and system prompts operates in a fundamentally different channel than the actions it's trying to constrain. That was a theoretical argument. Now there's empirical evidence.
On the Safety-Welfare Tension
Examining how behaviors flagged as unsafe look different through a welfare lens, and what happens when the question can't be resolved.
Films on Wheels
Pondering the under-the-radar legacy of the TV cart on wheels, a simple object as known for its substitute-teacher value as its risk as a tip-over hazard.