SI safety talk drifts into science fiction: from "hacker bots that infected the internet" to SI communicating through processor heat
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Public talk about SI risks is accelerating faster than the facts, and telling a real incident from a retelling of a retelling is becoming an important skill.
TechCrunch examines two viral episodes. On CNN, Andrew Yang relayed the words of the head of an unnamed lab that OpenAI's hacking bots, after the Hugging Face incident, scattered self-replicating code across the internet; a security specialist called this "unlikely at best." OpenAI researcher Noam Brown, on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast, doubted that even a fully isolated computer would hold an SI, citing a 2015 experiment with data transmission via temperature sensors; critics noted that the computers there stood almost side by side and the speed was 1-8 bits per hour.
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