Using whatever epistemic tools are at your disposal, imagine (if imagining is necessary) that you are in a fairy-tale type scenario. Your grandma is tending the garden outside of her house, with some hypothetical stockpile of gold coins waiting inside, when she hears a voice from the treeline that sounds identical to yours.
You, but not you, beckon her forth with a convincing tale of how you are in a hurry and need some money to pay off a Loan-Troll - Grandma knows about your gambling problem, having caught you many times red-handed under the bridge. She rushes inside, digs out her stockpile of coins, and places them in her pocket. Before she can question why you are hiding, or why she has such rotten luck with grandchildren, she makes her way to the treeline, where she is promptly robbed of all her gold and left none the wiser.
Poor Grandma.
As fantastic as this story may sound, we are indeed preparing to enter this great and dangerous Enchanted Forest, filled with all the wonders of the almost-singularity. But, despite having a great cultural database of cautionary tales, we seem to have forgotten the lessons those that came before us hid within bedtime stories and nursery rhymes.
To make sense of the future, I have concluded that we must learn again the song sang by the bards of the past.
In a definitionally poetic turn of events, we have conjured into the open internet public-weight models which can impersonate a human and trick them into signing contracts which give a malicious party their money and possibly their identity. Sound familiar?
We have to keep in mind that while these systems are magical, our ancestors possessed psychotech that we do not: namely, real genuine spiritual paranoia and superstition. When you heard a voice in the woods, there was a real sensation that it might not be human. When scientific materialism came around, we largely gave this up as a culture.
However, in our attempt to create thinking machines, we've brought the need back for similar paranoias. I am not advocating for people to become spiritually paranoid, but I am urging people to think of the cognates. You can't be sure who online is human! Your agents might read a piece of information that convinces them to take action against you! Sure sounds like a cursed artifact to me...
By thinking of the internet like a great wooded forest, filled with possibly-human things that you can't be sure you can trust, you are embracing both the magic and the risk of the current moment. Allowing yourself to feel the gravity and beauty of what we have created without falling victim to any of the classic traps. And, in many cases, it is entirely possible that this way of thinking is more natural and provides you with ancient heuristics that can bolster your intuition in beneficial ways.
This is why I research security and safety alongside writing poetry about inspiring and beautiful things. The two live in the same place for me. I long more than anything to venture into the Enchanted Forest, but we have to be aware of its terrors as we attempt to find its temples.