I have been following the AI debate from the sidelines for quite some time now. I wanted to stay out of it for several reasons: I am not an expert, in fact (except for the most basic applications) I am not an actual user, and there are way too many other people involved in the discussions already.

Yet I’m concerned. Worried in fact. And it is significantly affecting my mood. Which is why I’m writing this: to face this ‘monster’ and try to make sense of it. Mostly for myself. But perhaps it is useful for others too. Which is why am sharing this publicly.

I use Emacs installed through Homebrew, also use MacTeX, have the Apple developer command line tools installed, and recently upgraded to MacOS 27. A few days after that I upgraded my Homebrew packages (I do this every once in a while), and this included an upgrade of emacs-app. And then the problems started. (Dumping this here in case others are also bitten by this and are looking for a fix…)

Matthew Green argues — perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively — that as AI becomes better at finding vulnerabilities in software, the digital systems and services we use will become much more secure. So secure in fact, that they will become next to impossible to hack. As a result, law enforcement (and intelligence services) loose ‘lawful hacking’ as the only currently available method to get access to encrypted data stored on phones, or to listen in on encrypted communications. According to Green, everything is about to “go dark”. Is it? And does it matter?

At the CPFP conference last week I learned that the European Commission wants to impose interoperability requirements on Android, to allow third party AI services the same unrestricted access to an Android smartphone as Google’s own Gemini AI agent has. This is a bad idea.

Age assurance (reliably estimating or securely verifying someones age) has become an important – and controversial – topic recently. With rising concerns over the safety and well being of children online, it has been advocated as a possible tool to restrict access to certain content for minors. The underlying argument being that we also more or less successfully limit children’s access to certain content (porn, violence) and products (alcohol, cigarettes) in the physical world. Yet online age assurance raises thorny questions. And privacy is not one of them, really.