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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