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186 CHAPTER 8 The New AI: Basic Concepts, and Urgent Risks

threats to life in the United States. “You all are only worried because you don’t have
all the information. If you did, the way I do, you would be terrified out of your
minds.” Actually, thanks to NSF and IEEE, I have had access to some information
he did not have, which pushes in the same direction, but what he said was important
anyway.
Franks said that of all the threats he knew of, the threat from large electromag-
netic pulses (EMP) is the most serious and immediate. EMPs from solar flares or
from credible possible attacks might well take down enough of the power grid to
bring the United States back to the Stone Age, except for the obvious possibility
of nuclear or biological warfare then taking down what is left. The EMP attack is
serious, and is discussed further in my recent paper for NATO on risks from
terrorism and how to deal with them [51].
Equally important, however, is the threat of a coordinated attack to take down
half the generators in the country, which would have very similar effects. In the
past, operators of the critical power infrastructure have been far more secure than
other infrastructures, in part because they would use operating systems like
SE-Linux, backed up by support from Red Hat and NSA, using technology derived
from the provably unbreakable “Orange Book” technology first developed for the
Honeywell Multics system. (As it happens, the first implementation of backpropaga-
tion ran on that system [20], and that gave me a chance to see some of the innards;
see http://multicians.org/.) But backdoors have been a major part of that system, and
recent leaks have made it more and more clear that our situation is ever riskier.
Neural network intrusion detection can help, as can the “sandboxing” being
developed by Bromium, but neither should not be oversold as a complete solution.
In fact, it may be that the most urgent need for new developments in all of the IT
sector is a need for new directions in unbreakable operating systems [51].
One of the major cultural problems here is that risk assessments often
assume that risks are independent events, and underestimate rare but catastrophic
“correlated risks.” More and more, other critical infrastructures need the same level
of additional security which the power grid does.

5.3 THREATS FROM UNDEREMPLOYMENT OF HUMANS
Many people in the IT field believe, with reason, that the coming massive loss of jobs
worldwide will lead to conflicts so severe that we might not survive them [52].
Underemployment in the United States has already started to cause serious political
conflicts, as people worry more and more about jobs, but it seems that what is
coming will dwarf all that. The Millennium Project has compiled and unified dozens
of studies of future employment from all over the world, and the scenarios for the
next few decades are not reassuring [53]. Cultural problems and conflicting views
about human potential are part of the reason for disturbing world conflicts [51]
growing recently, but the sheer rise in unemployment of young males in the Middle
East is thought to be just as important by many. It will not help if new IT happens to
centralize power in a way which is all too tempting to certain groups both in the West