We’re worrying about the wrong AI apocalypse
AI doesn’t need to go rogue to threaten the power grid — it just needs to hack into the control rooms like this one. | Kristen Norman/Bloomberg via Getty Images Nearly two decades ago, a group of researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory ran a secret experiment, known as the Aurora Generator Test, on a massive emerald green diesel generator. Using 30 lines of code, they hacked into the generator’s virtual backroom, corrupting safeguards and flipping switches that left it out of sync with the rest of the power grid. Before an audience of electrical utility executives and energy department officials watching from a nearby room, the 27-ton generator jolted violently, sputtering out a dark smoke as its rubber innards rapidly tore themselves apart. “The implication was that with just a few lines of code, you can create conditions that were physically going to be very damaging to the machines we rely on,” lead researcher Michael Assante later told the journalist Andy Greenberg for his book Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers. “I had a very real pit in my stomach. It was like a glimpse of the future.” That future seems to have creeped...
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