Setting the Scene (Public v1; October 25)

Context: I created this to share before the start of courses I facilitate to provide a refresher on recent events, but also as a hook to draw students into engaging with some of ideas we think about in AI safety early. I expect the topics I cover in my “Setting the Scene” post to change frequently, so this is less polished than some of my other content. I emphasise to students that these posts are to be considered as bonus content —not core curriculum content—and that as such they are really just there for students who want to go deeper, before or after the course. I also provide a lot of links; this is to make it easy for students to follow up anything that catches their interest. Any feedback on how to improve these posts would be greatly appreciated. Cyber Security I think it’s worth reflecting that it is a particularly pertinent time to be doing a course on AI safety. A lot has happened recently. In the last week, the big thing has been cyber vulnerabilities, most prominently php2shell (see Elias Taylor’s pushback against this bug being easily exploitable and Hacker News commentators pushing back against him), but a lot else has happened as well. The number of CVE’s (Common Vul