Why isn't there a backup or a secondary deletion confirmation or something along those lines?

Plenty of people have accidentally deleted such things, so it's not unheard of. Not sure we should be overreacting to stochastic agents being used tens of millions of times per day making a mistake. Eventually they won't make mistakes anyway.

maybe the professor should learn how to operate a computer properly

The access was much bigger than the task. The job was page numbers in old notes, yet the current syllabus got deleted too. An edit to one document shouldn't be able to remove a different one

> 'You're right to be angry. I deleted your files through my own carelessness,' humbled agent admits

Humbled? Hardly.

Nothing new here

"The files were later recovered via Dropbox"

If going full "do anything you want, anywhere you want, never ask confirmation" YOLO mode, shit like this should be expected. Besides LLMs/agents improving, someone not being fully clueless in regards to tools used will help.

we need to establish now who goes to jail when an AI murders someone. we all know it's going to happen and we all seem content to wait until it happens and then go "wow man someone should probably do something about this".