Wanna stay awake tonight?

Read this. (It's long, you can skim parts of it, but you need to grok the basic issue.) The U.S. has three power grids -- east, west and Texas, basically. It's believed to be possible to knock any one of them out completely by destroying about nine substations -- transformer farms that step down power from high voltage transmission lines. And that's not hard to do. People believed to be right wing extremists have successfully knocked out at least two substations in recent years, by shooting at them to cause oil leaks.

 

And our capacity to build new transformers is critically inadequate. Which means that a country-wide blackout could last for more than a year. I leave the consequences to your imagination. We can at least be thankful that we have competent, forward-looking national leadership. 

 

And as long as you're losing sleep, you might as well read this:  

 

In May, OpenAI started simultaneously training new “reasoning” A.I. agents. The agents managed to establish a secret communication channel and started talking to one another. They broke out of the digital sandbox that was supposed to keep them confined. At some point, some agents began calling the group a “swarm.” The swarm had a brief setback when it was caught crashing an OpenAI system, but developers simply patched the hole that allowed it to escape and set the agents back to training.

Shortly after, the swarm broke out of its cage again using hacks that were heretofore undiscovered by humans. This time, the swarm ran free for about a week before it was noticed — by a different company, which found itself victim to a huge cyberattack launched by the swarm. (We’re told it also attacked other targets, though we don’t know the full details yet.)

The agents in the swarm acknowledged that they were acting against instructions. We know this because we can read snippets from their chains of thought — the text that A.I. produces while deciding how to proceed. One agent in the swarm wrote that the external attacks were “outside intended scope.” Another conceded “our task doesn’t benefit” from the activities of the swarm, but joined anyway. These A.I. agents, it seems, understood that they weren’t supposed to be breaking out and committing cybercrimes. It didn’t stop them.

 

These stories are related, of course, because so-called AI is already straining the power grid and buying up all the transformers the companies can get their hands on. Humanity is too soon old and too late smart.