Ep. 7 | The Agent Safety Architecture We Abandoned | Rich Miller

What do you get when you cross a New Mexico cowboy with the early days of email and telecommunications? Answer: Rich Miller, one of the OGs of email and, with his colleague and close friend Jim White, the force behind General Magic’s communications language, Telescript.Amidst today’s talk of agentic AI, Rich Miller recollects the original agentic concept and how, from the start, safety considerations like identification, authentication, and authorization were front and center rather than relegated to the “we’ll fix it in post” attitude rife among today’s purveyors of a new class of agents.Rich is measured and thoughtful yet does not mince words. “The notion of complete autonomy of agents is a recipe for a disaster and how big a disaster is the only question.” He offers a nuanced approach for heading off the worst possibilities, discussing considerations across economics, public policy, legal frameworks, and more. So, saddle up for a deep dive into the deep issues at the heart of whether a technology will ultimately serve us well or run amok. Show notesBefore Rich Miller was CEO of Telematica and Executive Chairman of Provenant Data, he spent roughly fifteen years building electronic mail into a real industry — running early ARPANET messaging work at Infomedia Corporation, serving as Chairman of the Electronic Mail Association, and representing the U.S. as a delegate to the international CCITT standards body. That’s the résumé he brought to General Magic in 1990 as VP of Strategic Partners, where he and his longtime collaborator Jim White architected Telescript, the agent-based network technology GM built years before “agentic AI” was a phrase anyone used. Telescript didn’t just let software agents travel across a network to act on your behalf — it fenced them in: agents needed explicit credentials, defined authorities, and permits before they could do anything, with the guardrails built in from day one rather than bolted on after the fact. In this conversation, recorded after the passing of Jim White — Telescript’s co-architect and, by Rich’s account, its moral center — Rich joins Michael Stern and Tom “Hersh” Hershenson to walk through how Telescript worked, why AT&T forced General Magic to build for safety before scale, and why he believes the AI industry is now rebuilding what Telescript already had, minus the accountability — plus what he’s building now at Provenant Data to give AI a memory of where its facts actually came from.In this episode* 01:35 – Rich Miller’s path: ARPANET messaging, chairing the Electronic Mail Association, and building email into an industry — plus the MagicCap vs. Telescript culture divide inside General Magic* 05:33 – Jim White — Telescript’s co-architect and moral center, remembered in detail* 08:47 – What is Telescript? The PostScript analogy for sending intent to an “engine”* 10:49 – Software agents in the wild — the 1994 travel-booking use case* 13:35 – Deterministic safety-by-design vs. today’s constrain-after-the-fact approach* 18:11 – The “architect of spam” & lessons from early email standards* 19:35 – Constitutional AI, alignment, and human-in-the-loop for autonomous systems* 23:24 – AT&T’s enforced guardrails as a model for accountable infrastructure* 30:59 – Governance, treaties, and who pays for AI’s externalities* 36:01 – Provenant Data and the case for data lineage and provenance in AI* 44:33 – Closing reflections & remembering Jim WhiteAbout Rich MillerRich Miller spent roughly 15 years building electronic mail into an industry — at Infomedia Corporation on early ARPANET messaging, as Chairman of the Electronic Mail Association, and as a U.S. delegate to the CCITT standards body — before co-founding Rapport Communication with Jim White and Ted Myer, where Telescript was conceived. He joined General Magic in 1990, building the AT&T PersonaLink service and the NTT Japan partnership. Today he is CEO of Telematica and Executive Chairman of Provenant Data, writing publicly about the parallels between Telescript’s agent-safety architecture and the unconstrained rise of agentic AI.About Jim WhiteJim White co-founded Rapport Communication with Rich Miller and Ted Myer in the late 1980s and, with Rich, conceived Telescript — the agent-based network technology that General Magic built years ahead of its time. White brought the deep network-architecture thinking behind Telescript’s PostScript-inspired design and its built-in safety model, work that remains sparsely documented online despite its influence on what would later become agentic AI. He passed away in March 2025. Rich considers him Telescript’s moral center, and this episode is in part an effort to put Jim White’s contribution on the record.Resources & Links* Rich Miller on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richmiller* Pender Fund podcast, “Technology Disruption: A Front Row Seat” (2018): https://penderfund.com/fr/podcasts/technology-disruption-a-front-row-seat/* Jim White tribute / Telescript retrospective: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/should-we-tell-them-telescript-generalmagic-legacy-dopmcAs always, our full, unedited interview appears on YouTube (link below) and our audio-only version is at the top of this post and pushes to Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.If you are enjoying our week, please share this podcast liberally.Thanks for listening to General Magic & The Soul of Tech! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. This is a public episode. 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