I’m pretty surprised at how far this went, JenniferRM covered a surprisingly large proportion of the issue (although there’s a lot of tangents e.g. the FDA, etc so it also covered a lot of stuff in general). I’d say more, but I already said exactly as much as I was willing to say on the matter, and people inferred information all the way up to the upper limit of what I was willing to risk people inferring from that comment, so now I’m not really willing to risk saying much more. Have you heard about how CPUs might be reprogrammed to emit magnetic frequencies that transmit information through faraday cages and airgaps, and do you know if a similar process can turn a wide variety of chips into microphones via using the physical CPU/ram space as a magnetometer? I don’t know how to verify any this, since intelligence agencies love to make up stuff like this in the hopes of disrupting enemy agencies counterintelligence departments.
I’m not really sure how tractable this is for Elizabeth to worry about, especially since the device ultimately was recommended against, and anyway it’s Elizabeth seems to be more about high-EV experiments, rather than defending the AIS community from external threats. If the risk of mind-hacking or group-mind-hacking is interesting, a tractable project would be doing a study on EA-adjacents to see what happens if they completely quit social media and videos/shows cold-turkey, and only read books and use phones for 1-1 communication with friends during their leisure time. Modern entertainment media, by default, is engineered to surreptitiously steer people towards time-mismanagement. Maybe replace those hours with reading EA or rationalist texts. It’s definitely worth studying as the results could be consistent massive self-improvement, but it would be hard to get a large representative sample of people who are heavily invested in/attached to social media (i.e. the most relevant demographic).
I don’t understand your threat model at all. You’re worried about what sounds like a theoretical concern (or you would’ve provided examples of actual harm done) in the form of a cyber attack against AI safety people who wear these bracelets. Meanwhile we’re aware of a well-documented and omnipresent issue among AI safety people, namely mental health issues like depression, and better health (including from better sleep) helps to mitigate that. Why do you think that in this world, the calculation favors the former, rather than the latter?
(I’m aware that a similar line of argument is also used to derail AI safety concerns towards topics like AI bias. I would take this counterargument more seriously if LW had even a fraction of the concern for cybersecurity which it has for AI safety.)
Besides, why worry about cyberattacks rather than the community’s wrench vulnerability?
I’m pretty surprised at how far this went, JenniferRM covered a surprisingly large proportion of the issue (although there’s a lot of tangents e.g. the FDA, etc so it also covered a lot of stuff in general). I’d say more, but I already said exactly as much as I was willing to say on the matter, and people inferred information all the way up to the upper limit of what I was willing to risk people inferring from that comment, so now I’m not really willing to risk saying much more. Have you heard about how CPUs might be reprogrammed to emit magnetic frequencies that transmit information through faraday cages and airgaps, and do you know if a similar process can turn a wide variety of chips into microphones via using the physical CPU/ram space as a magnetometer? I don’t know how to verify any this, since intelligence agencies love to make up stuff like this in the hopes of disrupting enemy agencies counterintelligence departments.
I’m not really sure how tractable this is for Elizabeth to worry about, especially since the device ultimately was recommended against, and anyway it’s Elizabeth seems to be more about high-EV experiments, rather than defending the AIS community from external threats. If the risk of mind-hacking or group-mind-hacking is interesting, a tractable project would be doing a study on EA-adjacents to see what happens if they completely quit social media and videos/shows cold-turkey, and only read books and use phones for 1-1 communication with friends during their leisure time. Modern entertainment media, by default, is engineered to surreptitiously steer people towards time-mismanagement. Maybe replace those hours with reading EA or rationalist texts. It’s definitely worth studying as the results could be consistent massive self-improvement, but it would be hard to get a large representative sample of people who are heavily invested in/attached to social media (i.e. the most relevant demographic).
I don’t understand your threat model at all. You’re worried about what sounds like a theoretical concern (or you would’ve provided examples of actual harm done) in the form of a cyber attack against AI safety people who wear these bracelets. Meanwhile we’re aware of a well-documented and omnipresent issue among AI safety people, namely mental health issues like depression, and better health (including from better sleep) helps to mitigate that. Why do you think that in this world, the calculation favors the former, rather than the latter?
(I’m aware that a similar line of argument is also used to derail AI safety concerns towards topics like AI bias. I would take this counterargument more seriously if LW had even a fraction of the concern for cybersecurity which it has for AI safety.)
Besides, why worry about cyberattacks rather than the community’s wrench vulnerability?