★ I’ll Wait

It’s Friday, and Muse is still the #1 app in the iOS App Store — that’s a full week in the top spot. Who knows if it’s a flash in the pan or not. (Remember Clubhouse? Sora?) But at the moment it’s clearly a hit. It certainly helps that Meta itself is promoting Muse heavily on their own channels like Instagram and Facebook.

The Muse iOS app is sandboxed — because it has to be. So that’s the only version I’m personally tinkering with. But the Mac app is the more powerful one, because, well, it lets Muse drive your Mac. The fact that the Muse Mac app is so powerful is why it has to be downloaded from the web. It’s not in the Mac App Store because apps that do what the Muse Mac app does aren’t permitted in the Mac App Store — or are only permitted with hard-to-get entitlements. There are a lot of good reasons why good Mac developers have long been frustrated by those rules. (Users too.) But the upside of Apple’s restrictive Mac App Store policies is that users can blindly install apps from the Mac App Store and trust that those apps cannot run amok on their system.

The way I think about running an agentic AI on my Mac is simple. I would never let an unknown person use my Mac. Not even for a minute, not even with me watching them. Let alone letting them use it nonstop, without my watching them. I’d be uncomfortable letting even a trusted friend use my Mac, logged into my user account. So why would I let an AI robot, no matter the source? It doesn’t even get to the point of my considering Meta as Muse’s creator. I wasn’t tempted an iota to try OpenClaw, and I’m not tempted to try Muse on my Mac. On a Mac, maybe. But not my Mac.

Same thing for granting Muse — running in the cloud, not on my Mac — access to my email, or calendar, or banking. I wouldn’t grant a stranger access to my email. So why would I grant a robot? But my refusal to grant Muse access to anything like that means that it’s basically just a toy for me to poke at.

A lot of people hire personal assistants — humans — and give them access to their email (and calendar, files, bank accounts, etc.). I’ve never done that, but I’ve long considered it. I see the appeal. But if I hired a personal assistant, I’d get to know them first. Develop some trust. My time is valuable, but not as valuable as my comfort, and I’d be excruciatingly uncomfortable giving anyone — or anything — I didn’t trust access to my life. I’m not saying I will never grant access to such things to an AI agent. In fact, I bet that sooner or later I will, to some carefully measured extent. But not now.

One of my favorite teachers in high school was a history teacher named Gary Choyka. I had him for morning homeroom too, and I loved that he had a daily subscription to The Philadelphia Inquirer, a real newspaper, not just our Podunk suburban rag. Mr. Choyka was a great teacher, full stop. I learned a lot about the world, and a ton about our civil rights and liberties here in the U.S. from him. It was from Mr. Choyka that I learned that you do not have to allow the police to enter your home just because they’re at the door claiming that they’re going to enter the home. That came in handy at some high school parties (and made me the designated knock-at-the-door answerer).

Part of what made Mr. Choyka a great teacher is that he had a wonderful presence, a mastery of the classroom. And he had one devastatingly effective technique. If he was giving a lecture and a bit of chatter between students grew to the point of even slight disruption, he’d just stop talking, mid-sentence, stare at the chattering students, and after waiting a few beats, say, “I’ll wait.”

Having been the disruptive whisperer more than once, I still feel small thinking about that phrase. It was like getting zapped by Rick Moranis’s kid-shrinking machine. Thirty-some years later and I can still hear him saying it. I’ll wait. It worked because he meant it. He wasn’t going to compete for attention.

It’s not really an analogous situation at all. But somehow it’s Mr. Choyka’s signature line that comes to mind when I ponder how I feel about AI agents — at least the sort of ones like Muse that want control over my personal computing, and really, personal life. I’ll wait.