The Calliope of Dread

When It Comes To Agentic AI, If Is Still a Very Big Word, Even If When Is Not

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As expected, Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote yesterday morning debuted a new, generative AI-powered Siri that Apple claims can significantly extend the capabilities of any human being with a late model iPhone in their pocket. We’ve heard this before, of course, most infamously in Apple’s WWDC keynote of two years ago. Should we believe that this time around they can actually deliver on the promises they made then? I think not, not at least until they can explain in reasonably granular detail how they plan to address what I still see as three glaringly obvious failure modes for their new agentic Siri.

First, to be even remotely usable in a real-world context, Siri’s promised conversational and multimodal capabilities must be 100% reliable. If they are not, we may wind up being held hostage by a tool that can collect and assesses complex data, draw conclusions from that data, and act on those conclusions too fast for us to predict or escape the consequences of any cognitive mistakes they make along the way.

Second, to do for us what Apple promises, to carry out complex multimodal tasks on on our behalf without any oversight or guidance from us beyond an initial natural language request, the new agentic Siri requires full access to the personal data stored on our computing devices, and full control of the applications running on them. Having presumably overseen the testing necessary to assure that Siri’s responses to our requests can be trusted, Apple seems confident that it can grant Siri this level of access and control to its own applications. For third-party applications, though, the situation is more complex. If, for example, Siri needs to schedule an appointment for an iPhone user, it already knows how to access the data in Apple’s calendar app, and how to add additional data to it. If a user chooses another calendar app as their default, Siri must rely on a feature of Apple’s operating systems called App Intents, which Apple describes as follows:

With App Intents, you express your app’s actions and data in a structured way that makes them discoverable by Apple Intelligence and provides deeper integration with system features people use frequently.

The problem here is that Apple is imposing a new and potentially expensive burden on third-party developers, Small, independent developers may lack the resources necessary to test and deploy Apple’s new guidelines as soon or as thoroughly as Apple expects, and large corporate developers, those who consider themselves Apple’s peers, may prefer their own cross-platform solutions and ignore Apple’s agentic ambitions for Siri as long as they can. (To be fair, in the continuing absence of any but the most rudimentary cross-platform user-interface standards, this seems likely to be the fate of any platform-specific approach to agentic AI deployment, not just Apple’s.)

These frictions between what Apple expects and what will actually happen may eventually reach some sort of accommodation. At this stage in the large-scale deployment of AI agents, though, an ordinary mortal relying on Siri to schedule a ride to a critical medical appointment in another city, transfer complex documents to multiple clients using different computing platforms, or book a two week travel itinerary to cities on another continent, may find themselves in more trouble than anyone, including Apple, is currently able to predict.

Third, it seems clear that very soon our computing devices will not only know everything about us that can be encompassed by digital databases, but will also be able to act in the world as though they were us without any consent on our part other than the implied consent of activating their agentic functions. What happens if we lose control of such a device? Nothing I’ve heard from Apple or any other company has offered anything to convince me that they’ve fully imagined the consequences of millions of digital Doppelgängers suddenly let loose in the world. Are we really sure we want to be continually subjected to an environment in which Apple and Google get to do the fucking around, and we’re left with no choice but to do the finding out? YMMV, but for my part, I’d at least like to be kissed first.

Downhill From the Anthropocene*

William Timberman7 Comments

*From a line in Jackson Browne’s song Downhill From Everywhere. The muse is as strong as ever in him.

A year and five months into Donald Trump’s second term as President, is there anyone left in the United States who hasn’t at least begun to realize just how quickly even the most stable-seeming institutions can implode, how we can wake up one morning in a world where it takes a wheelbarrowload, a truckload of familiar certainties to trade for a dozen eggs or a gallon of gasoline?

Yes, that’s a rhetorical question. We’re still on the brink of all sorts of revelations that have yet to reach the cretinous in their red hats, or the earnest in their fantasies of how all this could have been avoided if only Joe Biden had been just a little less sleepy, or Kamala Harris had been just a little more astute. The exceptions of American Exceptionalism are, it should now be clear to all but the most persistently deluded, as vulnerable to entropic processes as the divinity of the Pharoahs, the steadfastness of Roman virtus, or the persistence of sunlight on the British Empire.

Signs of the Apocalypse

William Timberman

Oligarchs, edgelords, influencers. The manosphere. Algorithms, blockchains, chatbot haruspications. Data centers, concentration camps, genocide. Stephen Miller in sunglasses and a shiny suit. The crooked cross at the base of Pam Bondi’s throat. The gig economy, the attention economy, the awake all night calliope of dread.

Does the Pope approve of Samuel Alito? Has Harvard made its deal with our new devils yet? Will someone please show me the way to the next whisky bar?

But never mind. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Deus vult.

Unbidden Bits—January 30, 2026

William Timberman

I hate to say it—and this is the first place I’ve said it publicly—but my personal doomsday clock for how close MAGA-style Republicans are to getting the civil war they’ve spent the last 40 years jonesing for is telling me that it’s now about 2 seconds to midnight. The inhabitants of the great cesspool at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue should be well pleased. The rest of us can only repeat what every previous victim of the human impulse to carnage and destruction has long since been forced to acknowledge. Knowing what’s coming has never saved anyone from disaster except those with the means to escape it. Einstein made it through the last world-wide cataclysm. Anne Frank and Sophie Scholl did not.

On the Morality of Violent Political Resistance

William Timberman2 Comments

From Ken White at the Popehat Report comes a long inquiry into the morality of political violence, ending with this concluding paragraph:

I think I have been perfectly clear. However, for the benefit of people easily offended by implication over bluntness, I think there is a plausible argument that it is morally permissible, and even morally necessary, to use political violence against the Trump Administration and its agents and supporters under the current circumstances in America. The arguments in favor are likely to grow.

Here is my response, edited to correct the name of the of the Border Patrol “commander at large” apparently in charge of ICE operations in Minneapolis:

I’m afraid I feel compelled to offer a different answer than the one Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. gave their lives to defend. No community is morally obligated to suffer what Gregory Bovino and his murderous thugs have done in Minneapolis to Renee Nicole Goode, Geraldo Lunas Campos, and Alex Pretti. Any community attacked the way ICE has attacked Minneapolis is morally justified in taking up arms against their attackers and driving them back to the sewer that spawned them. Our Declaration of Independence, as well as our own right to defend ourselves, says as much.

Practically speaking, of course, an armed response by a community under siege in the circumstances that Minneapolis finds itself in today would simply result in ending the lives of a few depraved assholes in exchange for the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocents. Abstaining from violence in these circustances has nothing to do with morality, but it does have everything to do with a resistance that is prudent as well as courageous. That’s why I agree, for the moment at least, that Governor Walz has the right strategy, if not the right tactics, to respond to the Federal Government’s atrocities. If we’re serious about our resistance, more consistent and more effective tactics will come to us eventually. In the meantime, sadly, we can count on continuing news of blood and cruelty that a genuinely moral person will find extremely hard to endure without striking back.

Questions. I Have Questions.

William Timberman

So when is some foreign army gonna come grab our disgusting dictator and spirit him off to an unknown destination? Will they let us see the Epstein files afterward, do you think? And what’s the likelihood they’ll be wanting our oil as compensation for the favor? The 21st century is just getting so confusing.

To Speak Plainly:

William Timberman4 Comments

This document could have been published by the German Nazi Party of 1933. It betrays our democratic constitutional order, threatens our most reliable allies, and makes white supremacy the cornerstone of our future foreign policy, It is nothing less than a blueprint for the creation of a fascist international. Every citizen of the United States who values the democratic traditions of this country should renounce both it and the filth it represents, shun the people who dared to write it, and drive them all from office.

The Kirk Circus

William Timberman4 Comments

Everybody has a take. Everybody is deploring, threatening, scribbling cringeworthy hagiographies, lowering flags to half mast, offering up thoughts and prayers.

Charlie Kirk got what he deserved. He got what he’d already said he’d be willing to accept, if not endorse, as collateral damage in pursuit of what he considered to be a vigorous and necessary defense of the second amendment.

He never imagined that he’d be the one with a fatal bullet hole in him. Those would be reserved for Jews, immigrants, black and brown people, gay people, women who refused his benevolent instruction, empathetic people, people who’d read the wrong books, and above all, people who’d had a belly full of his trumpeted triumphs of the will to come, the triumphs that he and his equally deluded buddies were peddling to anyone stupid enough to take them at face value.

Civil society is in abeyance in the US. This was never our fault, but restoring it is nevertheless our duty. We can start by not shedding any tears for this sad, sick, puer aeternus, whose intelligence matured tragically earlier than his wisdom.