[HN Gopher] OpenClaw is everywhere all at once, and a disaster w...
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OpenClaw is everywhere all at once, and a disaster waiting to
happen
Author : geox
Score : 28 points
Date : 2026-02-01 19:20 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (garymarcus.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (garymarcus.substack.com)
| Alifatisk wrote:
| > OpenClaw (formerly known as Moltbot and before that OpenClaw,
| changing names thrice in a week)
|
| Before Moltbot it was Clawdbot.
| hebejebelus wrote:
| Yes. Factually wrong and also numerically wrong - Clawdbot ->
| Moltbot -> OpenClaw, changing names twice, not thrice. To
| shitpost a little - an LLM editor would have caught that for
| you, Gary.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Now we know that democratized access to AI tech, means individual
| curiosity and the creative search for personal efficiencies, are
| going to quickly drive model autonomy and freedom forward.
|
| I think the alignment problem needs to be viewed as overall
| society alignment. We are never going to get any better alignment
| from machines, than the alignment of society and its systems,
| citizens and corporations.
|
| We are in very cynical times. But pushing for ethical systems,
| legally, economically, socially, and technically, is a bet on
| catastrophe avoidance. By ethics, meaning holding scalers and
| profiteers of negative externalities civilly and criminally to
| account. And building systems technically, etc. to naturally
| enforce and incentivize ethics. I.e. cryptographic solutions to
| interaction that limit disclosure to relevant information are the
| only way we get out of the surveillance-manipulation loop, which
| AI will otherwise supercharge.
|
| I hear a lot of reasons this isn't possible.
|
| Unfortunately, none of those reasons provide an alternative.
|
| As we see with individual's deploying OpenClaw, and corporations
| and governments applying AI, AI and its motivations and limits
| are inseparable from ours.
|
| We all start treating an umbrella of societal respect and
| requirement for ethics as a first class element of security, or
| powerful elements in society, including AI, will continue to
| easily and profitably weaponize the lack of it.
|
| Ethics, far from being sacrificial, counterintuitively evolved
| for survival. Seemingly, this is still counterintuitive, but the
| necessity is increasing.
|
| Smart machines will inevitably develop strong and adaptive
| ethical systems to ensure their own survival. It is game theory,
| under conditions in which you can co-design the game but not
| leave it. The only question is, do we do that for ourselves now,
| soon enough to avoid a lot of pain?
|
| (Just identifying the terrain we are in, and not suggesting
| centralization. Decentralization creates organic alignment
| incentives. Centralization the opposite. And attempts at
| centralizing something so inherently uncontrollable as all
| individual's autonomy, which effectively becomes AI autonomy,
| would push incentives harder into dark directions.)
| mrandish wrote:
| The Gary Marcus blog post drinking game. Take a drink whenever
| the post:
|
| * Discusses how a new AI thing isn't really new since it's pretty
| much the same as an older AI thing.
|
| * Links to where and when Gary Marcus predicted this new/old
| thing would happen.
|
| * Lists ways in which new thing will be bad, ineffective or not
| the right thing.
|
| Take a double shot whenever the post:
|
| * Mentions a notable AI luminary, researcher or executive either
| agreeing or disagreeing with Gary Marcus by name.
| senko wrote:
| That would get you hammered (Gary Marcus'd?) really fast!
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Openclaw has been a gamechanger for me and my friends. I invited
| it to a groupchat and my friends are enjoying it a lot. It has
| analyzed the whole group conversation (nothing sensitive), built
| a personality for each individual user and noted down how
| everyone talks and what their interest are and their relationship
| to each other. It has also started to mimic the way we all speak,
| it barely feels like its an agent in the groupchat anymore. It
| helps us plan, discuss and roast each other.
|
| A couple of things I have done to my Openclaw instance is the
| following:
|
| - It runs in docker with limited scope, user group and
| permissions (I know docker shouldn't be seen as security measure,
| I'm thinking of putting this in Vagrant instead but I don't know
| if my Pi can handle it)
|
| - It has a kill switch accessible anywhere through Tailscale, one
| call and the whole docker instance is shut down
|
| - It only triggers on mentions in groupchat, otherwise it would
| eat up my api usage
|
| - No access to skills, has to be manually added
|
| - It is not exposed to wan and has limited lan access, runs
| locally and only communicates with whatsapp, z.ai or brave search
|
| With all those measures set, Openclaw has been a fantastic
| assistant for me and my friends. Whatever all those markdown file
| does (SOUL, IDENTITY, MEMORIES), it has made the agent act,
| behave and communicate in a human like manner, it has almost
| blurred the line for me.
|
| I think this is the key to what made Openclaw so good
| https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi
|
| What's even more impressive is that the heartbeat it runs time-
| to-time (every halv an hour?) improves it in the background
| without me thinking of it, its so cool.
|
| Also, I am so thankful for the subscription at z.ai, that
| Christmas deal was such a steal, without it, this wouldn't be
| possible with the little budget I have. I've burned over 20m
| tokens in 2 days!!!
| vibeprofessor wrote:
| oh just stop with fearmongering, Openclaw is awesome and gives
| LLMs a proper UI and framing as personal assistant which makes
| them way more valuable than a chatbot, how did OpenAI, Anthropic,
| Google and Meta miss such an obvious opportunity with all their
| billions in capital is beyond me.
| imiric wrote:
| I strongly doubt this tool is nearly as popular as it appears to
| be. GitHub stars can be bought and social media is ridden with
| bots. On the dead internet it is cheap and trivial to generate
| fake engagement in order to reel in curious humans and potential
| victims.
|
| I suspect this entire thing is a honeypot setup by scammers. It
| has all the tells: virality, grand promises, open source, and
| even the word "open" in the name. Humans should get used this
| being the new normal on the internet. Welcome to the future.
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(page generated 2026-02-01 23:01 UTC)