this is fascinating and resonates with me on a deep level. I'm surprised I haven't stumbled across this yet.

I think we have this problem with all AI systems, e.g. I have let cursor write wrong code from time to time and don't review it at the level I should...we need to solve that for every area of AI. Not a new problem but definitely about to get way more serious

This is something we frequently saw at Uber. I would say it's the same as there's already an established pattern for this for any sort of destructive action.

Intriguingly, it's rather similar to what we see with LLMs - you want to really activate the person's attention rather than have them go off on autopilot; in this case, probably have them type something quite distinct in order to confirm it, to turn their brain on. Of course, you likely want to figure out some mechanism/heuristics, perhaps by determining the cost of a mistake, and using that to set the proper level of approval scrutiny: light (just click), heavy (have to double confirm via some attention-activating user action).

Finally, a third approach would be to make the action undoable - like in many applications (Uber Eats, Gmail, etc.), you can do something but it defers doing it, giving you a chance to undo it. However, I think that causes people more stress, so it’s rather better to just not do that than to confirm and then have the option to undo. It’s better to be very deliberate about what’s a soft confirm and what’s a hard confirm, optimizing for the human in this case by providing them the right balance of high certainty and low stress.