This description reminds me of NASA’s evolved antennae from a couple of decades ago. It was created by genetic algorithms:
https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
They used genetic algorithms to evolve digital circuits directly on FPGAs. The resulting design exploited things like electromagnetic interference to end up with a circuit much more efficient than a human could've created.
In my mind this brings some interesting consequences for 'AI apocalypse' theories. If the AI understand everything, even an air gap might not be enough to contain it, since it might be able to repurpose some of its hardware for wireless communication in ways that we can't even imagine.
It's a throwaway mechanic in the comic, but it seems plausible.
In certain places the power companies are/were passing time information throughout the whole grid - https://www.nist.gov/publications/time-and-frequency-electri...
Whatever AI comes up with by 2030 is going to be much more clever and unexpected.
I'll have a read of the paper, seems like it's similar in concept
Note for example TEMPEST surveillance, or using a distant laser to pickup speech in a room based on window vibrations. Air-gap traversal is easily done by exploiting human weaknesses (e.g. curiousity to pick up a USB drive to see what's on it), and was successfully done by Stuxnet.
But as someone said earlier, the real interesting part is when/if they start figuring out novel concepts we as humans haven't even considered.
Or data exfiltration through fan noise (60 bits/min): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01674...
Or data transfer between computers using only speakers: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03422
The list goes on.
> Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest — with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output — yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.
The design seemed alien and somewhat organic, but I can’t seem to find it now.
Looking at things like bicycles designed this way leaves me suspicious that it doesn’t actually have the power to derive interesting insights about material properties. I suspect future versions may end up starting to look more mechanical as it discovers that, for example, something under tension should be a straight line.
Why would that be the case, though? It's conceivable that optimal shapes be very different from what our intuitions suggest.
But I recommend logseq for anyone new! All the best features, none of the weird energy of roam, where i worry the founder is training ML models on data.
The bias toward familiarity is detrimental to edge research, but on the other hand if no one smooth the baseline, most advanced knownledge will remain just that and will never reach their full utility to humans. Finding the proper set of concepts that makes it click can be very complicated. Finding a communicable simple thought framework to let other also enjoy it and leverage on it to go further can be at least as hard.
> Just nothing that a human being would make, because it had no sense of symmetry, beauty, anything. It was just a mess.
NASA describing their antenna:
> It has an unusual organic looking structure, one that expert antenna designers would not likely produce.
— https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20060024675
The parallel seems obvious to me.
This comes up a lot and always strikes me as rather anti-science, even anti-rationality in general. To speed run the typical progression of this argument, someone says alchemy and astrology occasionally "work" too if you're determined to ignore the failures. This point is then shot down by a recap about the success of QM despite Einstein's objections, success of the standard model even with lots of quasi-empiricism etc, etc.
Structurally though.. if you want to claim that the universe is fundamentally weird and unknowable, it's very easy to argue this, because you can always ignore the success of past theory and formalisms by saying that "it was nice while it lasted but we've squeezed all the juice out of that and are in a new regime now". Next you challenge your detractors to go ahead and produce a clean beautiful symmetric theory of everything to prove you wrong. That's just rhetoric though, and arguments from model/information/complexity theory etc about fundamental limits on what's computable and decidable and compressible would be much more satisfying and convincing. When does finding a complicated thing that works actually rule out a simpler model that you've missed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length#MDL...
I've had a few of those, I think they're usually a symptom of stack corruption.
Timing matters.