The FBI, CIA, NSA, CISA and others issued a warning about active AI-driven attacks on American critical infrastructure. Craig, who ran the FBI's InfraGard online training program, explains what's actually exposed: old controllers that open and close valves, set flow rates, decide how much acid or base goes into the water — many of them reachable directly from the internet, on networks that have been comprehensively mapped for years. Several water systems have already been shut down; one town lost power along with its water.

Josh, who works InfraGard in his own homeland security practice, asks the right question: if an adversary can use AI to find and exploit these holes, what stops us using ours to find and patch them first?

Craig's answer is the best story in the segment. Last year a botnet was running attacks out of tens of thousands of home routers — cheap hardware bought at Staples or Walmart, full of holes. So the FBI and NSA hacked into those routers, on private home networks, and patched them, breaking the attackers' control. Our government hacked our own equipment to fix it. As far as Craig knows it has happened exactly once.

He's honest about the limits: defensive AI exists at Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI, but it can't help with vulnerabilities people don't know they have. And you can't change the consumer — people still buy cheap Android phones.

Also in this segment:

• Remembering Dolly Parton, who wanted to be faxed rather than called and didn't want her mind fed into an AI — alongside the Dolly Parton Experience built from lasers and technology, and hundreds of unreleased recordings
• A defense contractor employee who clicked one email and exposed the company; Craig has worked similar cases with the FBI's Boston office
• The two things to do about it: delete any program you haven't used in a while, on your phone as well as your computer, and put something like OpenDNS in front of your browsing so a known-bad link can't resolve

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The NSA, CISA, the FBI, the Department of Energy and the EPA put out a joint advisory last Wednesday, and the language is unusually direct: AI dramatically reduces the technical skill and the time required to attack industrial control systems. Those controllers run public works. A great many of them are reachable from the internet, and their locations are not a secret.

That sets up the larger conversation. Ray Kurzweil wrote The Singularity Is Near twenty years ago, predicting broadly human-level machine intelligence by 2029 and human-machine integration by 2045. Elon Musk and others now say we're already there. Craig disagrees with both, and explains why with a test that cuts through the argument: can it take genuinely unrelated ideas and put them together into something new? No. It cannot. What it does is follow trees of information it already has, very fast, from many angles at once.

He grants everything that deserves granting — reading a mammogram better than a radiologist is real, and it is still pattern matching against millions of prior images. Anyone who has used one of these tools to write code or draft a document knows the rest: it misses major things, and you are constantly correcting it.

Then Jeff asks the better question. Set reasoning aside — what about emotion? What makes one living thing care about another? Craig's answer is that we haven't finished defining it, which is its own kind of answer.

Also: the resolution to last week's Wi-Fi mystery, which turned out to be mesh extenders unplugged during a home renovation and never put back.

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Matt opens with a poll finding he calls one of the great PR failures of our time: people would rather have a nuclear power plant built next door than a data center. Pennsylvania's governor has now signed legislation that effectively stops data centers unless they clear a long approvals process.

Craig's answer isn't a defense of data centers so much as a description of what a few counties actually did. They said yes — on conditions. Generate your own power, and 20% more than you use, fed back into our grid. And pay full property tax, none of the abatement deals. It worked well enough that those counties are now tax-free for individual residents, with more power on the grid than before.

He also separates the honest concern from the manufactured one. If a data center is pulling from a stream and returning it at 120 degrees, that's a real problem worth zoning for. But China has been found amplifying anti-data-center sentiment in the United States through social media — the nudge concept again — because they would rather the U.S. not build. Alibaba's newest Qwen is reported on par with the best American models.

Then the second half, which Matt frames as another step toward Skynet: a near-autonomous cyberattack on the Taiwanese government, plus two more documented company attacks in a week and a half. In one, the attacker was brash enough to publish the prompt he used and describe walking away while it kept working.

Craig's framing is what makes it land. The old way was one vulnerability, one piece of code, six months to a year of work. The new way is "go for it, figure it out" — and it works because vulnerabilities are everywhere: over 500 Microsoft patches this month, about a dozen from Apple for macOS. As for regulating it, he asks how a law stops a Chinese open model that anyone in the world can already download.

Also in this segment: whether social media feedback loops explain the spread of political extremes, and Craig's read that this is a problem of financial motivation rather than technology.

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