Physicist questions AI safety research's lack of hardware perspective
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A physicist with experience in the AI industry argued on Hacker News that AI safety research has long been dominated by people with software backgrounds, with natural scientists and hardware engineers almost absent. He believes that the ultimate harm caused by AI will inevitably occur in the physical world, so hardware-level protections and physical-world records and other means can hedge risks; the determinism, chaos, and true randomness of physical systems may also give rise to security tools such as physics-based cryptography and honeypots. He attributes this absence to the difference between the two engineering cultures of bits and atoms.
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- Hacker News AIThe role of natural scientists and hardware engineers in AI safety
A physical scientist argues that natural scientists and hardware engineers are largely absent from AI safety work despite well-funded calls for their involvement, and that their "atoms" perspective could contribute physical-world defenses, physics-based cryptography, ecological analogies, and defense-in-depth approaches modeled on nuclear plant safety and airplane cockpit design. He attributes the gap partly to a culture difference between bits and atoms disciplines, and asks why the AI safety system of discourse, research, and funding excludes atoms people.
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