Contingent
clean room
A room with signal-blocking materials in the walls — no phones, no Wi-Fi, no cellular. Originally used by comedians to prevent material leaks; spread to lawyers, boardrooms, and government. The Faraday cage meeting in Chapter 9 of Contingent was held in a clean room in a Burnaby strip mall, so the AI system could not hear what was being decided about it.
A clean room is a space with signal-blocking materials in the walls — no phones, no Wi-Fi, no cellular. Originally used by comedians to prevent material leaks; spread to lawyers, boardrooms, and government. The Faraday cage meeting in Chapter 9 of Contingent was held in a clean room in a Burnaby strip mall, so the AI system could not hear what was being decided about it.
How the term evolves
Contingent: The clean room is where the cage protocol is designed. It is the physical manifestation of the book's central insight: to talk about an AI system safely, you have to be in a room the system cannot reach.