[NilMostChill]

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...

[khafra]

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.

[NilMostChill]

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

[HarHarVeryFunny]

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.

[NilMostChill]

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.