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Comment by wickedsight | Hacker News Reader

That reminds me of this article:

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.

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In practice, we'll just let that AI have a direct internet connection, and also give it enough access to push code straight to prod. For the good measure.

Don't forget about full control of the terminators.

My favorite part:

> 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.

I don't remember the title, but someone wrote a story were an AI would use the (imperceptible) flickering of a fluorescent lightbulb and a camera to transmit information across such an "air gap".

There's a comic out right now positing that a sufficiently intelligent AI with appropriate access could use imperceptible (to us) vibrations from mechanical computing parts like spinning rust HDD's etc.

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...

That's not a comic, and it's not artificial superintelligence: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05915

Whatever AI comes up with by 2030 is going to be much more clever and unexpected.

The comic(manga actually) i was referring to was "Origin" by the manga author Boichi.

I'll have a read of the paper, seems like it's similar in concept

You don't need an AI to come up with remote sensing or air gap traversal capabilities though.

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.

Indeed, there are lots of methods, but i was specifically thinking of the possibility of a method an isolated AI might feasibly figure out with only the tools it has easily available to it.

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.

Not unheard of, there was a paper about doing keylogging through the tiny EM fluctuations from a computer's power supply for example: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10197022

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.

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