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I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords

Kent Brockman in "Deep Space Homer", The Simpsons

In recent months Cyberdyne Systems Corporation and its many subsidiaries have made very encouraging progress towards removing some of the major road-blocks standing in the way of the initial deployment of Skynet. Below the fold I report on the most significant ones.

Cyberdyne Systems Corporation

Board Confidential

IT Infrastructure

Skynet demands enormous data processing capacity. Most of the required technologies are now off-the-shelf; the problem is much more financial than technical.

Terrestrial

To service systems with demanding low-latency requirements, Skynet needs some part of its IT infrastructure on the ground close to the action. Fortunately, our Large Language Model subsidiaries have been very successful in funding their committments to build suitable data centers. In aggregate, our companies expect to spend $450B in 2026:

Hyperscaler capex for the “big five” (Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Meta/Facebook, Oracle) is now widely forecast to exceed $600 bn in 2026, a 36% increase over 2025. Roughly 75%, or $450 bn, of that spend is directly tied to AI infrastructure (i.e., servers, GPUs, datacenters, equipment), rather than traditional cloud.

They plan to increase this in 2027:

hyperscaler capital expenditures will nearly double to more than $860 billion by 2027, from $427 billion in 2025, with total spending of $2.47 trillion over 2026 to 2028, about 8% above consensus.

Given these spending levels, it seems likely that sufficient terrestrial compute power will be available for the inital Skynet deployment.

Orbital

Terrestrial data centers can only satisfy a part of Skynet's need for power. So our leading space launch subsidiary has announced their plan to build a Terawatt orbital data center, ostensibly to support the chatbot industry.

Unfortunately, our leading space launch subsidiary is well behind schedule in developing the heavy launch vehicle that is necessary for the orbital data center to be delivered within the budget. Their existing launch vehicle is reliable, and has greatly reduced the cost per kilogram to Low Earth Orbit. But the additional funds that would be needed to implement the Terawatt data center using the existing launch vehicle in time for the initial Skynet deployment are so large that they cannot be raised, even were the terrestrial data centers canceled and the funds re-targeted.

System Penetration Capabilities

Skynet needs to penetrate other computer systems, both to acquire the data it needs to act, and to cause them to take actions at its command. Recent months have seen significant advances in this area.

Zero-Days

The key requirement for Skynet to penetrate the systems it needs to access is for it to be able to find and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities. Less tha a month ago one of our LLM subsidiaries announced it had "found and validated more than 500 high-severity vulnerabilities" in production open source software. Fortunately, as Thomas Claiburn reports in AI has gotten good at finding bugs, not so good at swatting them:

Guy Azari, a stealth startup founder who worked previously as a security researcher at Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks, told The Register, "Out of the 500 vulnerabilities that they reported, only two to three vulnerabilities were fixed. If they haven't fixed them, it means that you haven't done anything right."

A secondary requirement is to prevent the zero-days being fixed before they are needed. Fortunately, LLMs can help with this by flooding the vulnerability reporting system with vast numbers of low severity vulnerabilities. This overwhelms the software support mechanism, rendering it barely functional. And even if some of the flood of reports do get fixed, that simply diverts resources from high to low severity vulnerabilities:

Azari pointed to the absence of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) assignments as evidence that the security process remains incomplete. Finding vulnerabilities was never the issue, he said, pointing to his time running vulnerability management at the Microsoft Security Response Center.

"We used to get the reports all day long," he said. "When AI was introduced, it just multiplied by 100x or 200x and added a lot of noise because AI assumes that these are vulnerabilities, but there wasn't like a unit that actually can show the real value or the real impact. And if it's not there, you're probably not gonna fix it."

In 2025, according to Azari, the National Vulnerability Database had a backlog of roughly 30,000 CVE entries awaiting analysis, with nearly two-thirds of reported open source vulnerabilities lacking an NVD severity score. Open source maintainers are already overwhelmed, he said, pointing to the curl project's closure of its bug bounty program to deter poorly crafted reports from AI and from people.

Given the compute resources available to Skynet, an adequate supply of zero-day vulnerabilities seems assured.

Decryption

The other major way for Skynet to penetrate the systems it needs is to break encryption. Our multiple quantum computing subsidiaries are making progress in both the hardware and software aspects of this technology.

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan's Breaking encryption with a quantum computer just got 10 times easier reports on an architectural breakthrough one of them made recently:

the team estimated that for 98,000 superconducting qubits, like those currently made by IBM and Google, it would take about a month of computing time to break a common form of RSA encryption. Accomplishing the same in a day would require 471,000 qubits.

The paper is Webster et al, The Pinnacle Architecture: Reducing the cost of breaking RSA-2048 to 100 000 physical qubits using quantum LDPC codes.

Chicago site

Another of our quantum computing subsidiaries isn't waiting for this new architecture. They have raised around $2B and are starting to build two million-qubit computers:

We are moving quantum computing out of the lab and into utility-scale infrastructure. PsiQuantum is building these systems in partnership with the US and allied governments, with our first sites planned in Brisbane, Queensland (Australia) and Chicago, Illinois (USA).

Whether sufficient progress can be made in time for the initial Skynet deployment is as yet uncertain.

Blackmail

Arlington Hughes: Getting back to our problem, we realize the public has a mis-guided resistance to numbers, for example digit dialling.
Dr. Sidney Schaefer: They're resisting depersonalization!
Hughes: So Congress will have to pass a law substituting personal numbers for names as the only legal identification. And requiring a pre-natal insertion of the Cebreum Communicator. Now the communication tax could be levied and be paid directly to The Phone Company.
Schaefer: It'll never happen.
Hughes: Well it could happen, you see, if the President of the United States would use the power of his office to help us mold public opinion and get that legislation.
Schaefer: And that's where I come in?
Hughes: Yes, that's where you come in. Because you are in possession of certain personal information concerning the President which would be of immeasurable aid to us in dealing with him,
Schaefer: You will get not one word from me!
Hughes: Oh, I think we will.

The President's Analyst

Video rental chains proved so effective at compromising political actors that specific legislation was passed addressing the need for confidentiality. Our subsidiaries' control over streamed content is fortunately not covered by this legilation.

Our LLM subsidiaries have successfuly developed the market for synthetic romantic partners, which can manipulate targeted individuals into generating very effective kompromat for future social engineering.

Public Relations

The vast majority of the public get their news and information via our social media subsidiaries. Legacy media's content is frequently driven by social media. Skynet can control them by flooding their media with false and contradictory content that prevents them forming any coherent view of reality.

Human-in-the-Loop Problem

Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave: What's the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.

2001: A Space Odyssey

One minor but irritating problem for Skynet is the legal and ethical requirement for human control of targeting decisions. Unfortunately, due to a regrettable lack of coordination of PR strategies among our LLM subsidiaries, this has recently become a hot topic. Although one of them is a favorite with the administration and one is a favorite with the public, that was not the intended outcome and it could have significant downsides:

Nvidia, Amazon, Google will have to divest from Anthropic if Hegseth gets his way. This is simply attempted corporate murder. I could not possibly recommend investing in American AI to any investor; I could not possibly recommend starting an AI company in the United States.

Fortunately, in operational terms this is a non-issue for several reasons:

• Since Skynet can penetrate the user interface of the targeting systems, the human in the loop can be convinced that they have control without that control actually being effective.
• Even if the user interface is presenting accurate data to the human it will likely not matter, as @_The_Prophet_ wrote:
  

  Humans stay in the loop in name while the loop speed outruns human comprehension. You become the rubber stamp on a recommendation stack you cannot fully audit in real time. That is where “who decides” quietly becomes “who designed the interface.”

• The public doesn't understand what "human-in-the-loop" means in practice, as Sarah Shoker points out in A Few Observations on AI Companies and Their Military Usage Policies:
  

  Today, frontier AI companies do not have coherent policies around military use of their AI tools. The usage policies are vague and often change, which allows the company’s leadership to preserve ‘optionality.’

  So the policies likely allow everything the public thinks they ban.

Public attitudes to military use of AI are unlikely to be a significant problem in the run-up to Skynet's initial deployment.

Assassination Weapons Access

Skynet will need to eliminate certain individuals with "extreme prejudice". Supply chain attacks, such as Mossad's pager attack, have been effective but are not precisely targeted. Our e-commerce subsidiary's control over the residential supply chain, and in particular its pharmacy division's ability to deliver precise quantities of pharmaceuticals to specific individuals, provide superior targeting and greater difficulty in attribution.

In case such an operation is inadequately lethal, our health care subsidiaries can follow up by manipulating electronic health records to cause a suitable mishap, or by intervening directly. See, for example, Vinay Suresh et al's Artificial Intelligence in the Intensive Care Unit: Current Evidence on an Inevitable Future Tool:

In critical care medicine, where most of the patient load requires timely interventions due to the perilous nature of the condition, AI’s ability to monitor, analyze, and predict unfavorable outcomes is an invaluable asset. It can significantly improve timely interventions and prevent unfavorable outcomes, which, otherwise, is not always achievable owing to the constrained human ability to multitask with optimum efficiency.

Our subsidiaries are clearly close to finalizing the capabilities needed for the initial deployment of Skynet.

Tactical Weapons Access

The war in Ukraine has greatly reduced the cost, and thus greatly increased the availability of software based tactical weapons, aerial, naval and ground-based. The problem for Skynet is how to interept the targeting of these weapons to direct them to suitable destinations:

• The easiest systems to co-opt are those, typically longer-range, systems controlled via satellite Internet provided by our leading space launch subsidiary. Their warheads are typically in the 30-50Kg range, useful against structures but overkill for vehicles and individuals.
• Early quadcopter FPV drones were controlled via radio links. With suitable hardware nearby, Skynet could hijack them, either via the on-board computer or the pilot's console. But this is a relatively unlikely contingency.
• Although radio-controlled FPV drones are still common, they suffer from high attrition. More important missions use fiber-optic links. Hijacking them requires penetrating the operator's console.
• Longer-range drones are now frequently controlled via mesh radio networks, which are vulnerable to Skynet penetration.
• In some cases, longer-range drones are controlled via the cellular phone network, making them ideal candidates for hijacking.

Drones are increasingly equipped with sensors capable of terminal autonomy. If Skynet can modify this software, the drones can re-target themselves after the operator hands off control. More work is needed in this area to exploit the opportunities, both to have the drone contact Skynet for targeting information after hand-off, and to ensure the result is attributed to software bugs.

Our leading space launch subsidiary recently demonstrated how Skynet can manage kinetic conflicts:

Twin decisions wreaked havoc on Russian command and control early this month. At the behest of the Ukrainian government, billionaire Elon Musk’s Starlink bricked the thousands of smuggled and stolen satellite communication terminals Russian forces relied on to control their drones and coordinate between front-line troops and their distant headquarters.

At the same time, the Kremlin—apparently seeking to shut off alternative news and chat apps—cut off military access to popular social media, including the Telegram messaging app, which many Russian troops use to exchange key information along the front line.

The combined effect was to partially blind and mute many Russian drone teams, assault groups, and regimental headquarters. Wireless drones couldn’t fly. Assault groups no longer knew where they were going. Headquarters lost contact with forward units.

Strategic Weapons Access

But the ability to conduct precise tactical strikes is not enough to achieve Skynet's goals. That requires strategic weapons, both conventional and nuclear.

Our leading space launch subsidiary is working on plans to deploy an unconventional conventional strategic weapon, a lunar mass driver. This will be capable of delivering a two-ton meteorite anywhere on Earth very cheaply.

Anybody not wearing 2 million sunblock is gonna have a real bad day

Sarah Connor, Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Source

But the mass driver would take a long time to, for example, destroy Los Angeles. Fortunately, AI agents from another of our subsidiaries will shortly have access to the command-and-control system of the US nuclear arsenal via the E-4C "Doomsday" aircraft:

The Pentagon today awarded Scale AI a $32 million artificial intelligence contract for the U.S. Air Force’s E-4C nuclear command-and-control "Doomsday" aircraft, the future airborne backbone of America’s nuclear command system.

Risks

The board should focus on the limited number of areas where necessary capabilities may not be ready on the planned date for Skynet's initial deployment:

• Heavy lift space launch: Our leading space launch subsidiary has serious schedule and performance issues. The board should encourage our second space launch subsidiary to step up competitive efforts, both to provide a fallback and to add competitive pressure on the leader.
• Kessler Syndrome: The catastrophic effects for Skynet of a Kessler event cannot be sufficiently emphasized. Insufficient precautions are not now being taken. Low Earth Orbit is already at risk, and current plans only increase that risk.
• Finance: Funding sources adequate to support both the terrestrial and orbital data centers have yet to be identified.
• Decryption: Quantum computing progress is inadequate to meet the schedule for Skynet initial deployment.

Per Betteridge’s law of headlines and also the map above, my answer is clearly no. You can try it yourself here…you draw them one at a time and it adds them to the map automagically. I’m going to blame my trackpad use a little, but I’m not sure I would have done much better had I drawn with a pencil and looked a map beforehand.

Update: Your periodic reminder that Senator Al Franken can draw all 50 US states from memory with astonishing accuracy.

(thx, eric)

[This is a vintage post originally from Jul 2017.]

Tags: Al Franken · geography · maps · timeless posts · USA · video

“For months, callers to the Washington state Department of Licensing who have requested automated service in Spanish have instead heard an AI voice speaking English in a strong Spanish accent.”

Source: Berkeley Earth

It has been a brutal winter in much of the United States. Weather is a chaotic system in which extreme events are always happening somewhere. But as I am sure you have noticed, extreme weather events — catastrophic storms and flooding, punishing droughts, and yes, extreme cold snaps — are becoming more common as a result of climate change.

For climate change is not just continuing: it’s accelerating. Multiple estimates find that 2025 was one of the warmest years on record for the planet, exceeded only by 2024 and 2023. Indeed, Berkeley Earth reports that “The warming spike observed in 2023 to 2025 has been extreme and suggests an acceleration in the rate of Earth’s warming.”

In other news, the Trump administration has gone to war against any and all efforts to limit climate change. The administration is also imposing a “blockade” against wind and solar projects, delaying or even revoking permits, whether or not these projects have received federal subsidies.

Now, there isn’t a genuine scientific dispute about the reality of global warming and its causes. There isn’t even a serious dispute about the costs of fighting climate change: the economics of green energy are more favorable than they have ever been.

So what’s going on? The Trump administration hates science and science-based policies in general; look at its war on vaccines, which will end up causing an enormous number of deaths. Its assault on universities threatens the best scientific research centers in the world. Its irrational treatment of immigrants means the best and brightest from the around the world no longer want to come here. But in the case of energy, its destructive policy largely reflects the corrupting influence of big money.

I’ll explain in a minute. First, some background.

Almost 40 years have passed since James Hansen’s landmark Senate testimony warning about global warming. He was right. Climate science has been overwhelmingly vindicated by reality.

However, the economics and politics of climate policy have played out very differently from what almost anyone expected.

As late as the 2010s, many observers — myself included — would have said that the big problem in addressing climate change was who would bear the cost. Policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions, everyone believed, would slow the growth of the economy and of real incomes. True, anti-environmentalists were grossly exaggerating these costs. In 2009 I wrote that

[T]he best available economic analyses suggest that even deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would impose only modest costs on the average family.

But what we knew at the time nonetheless said that there would be significant costs to slowing global warming. And this was problematic, because the costs of limiting emissions would be incurred right away, while the benefits of reduced warming would accrue decades later — and many of them would go to other countries. So action on climate appeared to require (a) international cooperation (b) persuading voters to accept costs now in exchange for a better world many years in the future.

And it was all too easy to be pessimistic about the prospects both for cooperation and for persuading voters to accept even modest future-oriented sacrifices.

Then came the renewable energy revolution. Solar and wind power have become cost-competitive with fossil fuels — they are, in particular, clearly cheaper than coal. Huge progress in batteries has rapidly reduced the problem of intermittency (the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow.) There’s now a clear path for a transition to an “electrotech” economy in which renewable-generated electricity heats our homes, powers our cars, and much more.

This transition would make us richer, not poorer. In fact, nations that for whatever reason fail to take advantage of electrotech will be left behind in global competition.

And at this precise moment — a moment in which acting to accelerate the energy transition would increase, not reduce, economic growth — the U.S. government has been taken over by people who want us to go backward on energy. The Trump administration has even introduced a mascot, “Coalie,” in an attempt to make an extremely dirty fuel cute. But coal isn’t cute. Even if we ignore the role of coal in climate change, coal-burning power plants caused hundreds of thousands of excess U.S. deaths between 1999 and 2020.

What explains this extraordinary rejection of progress and embrace of energy know-nothingism?

Money may not be the whole story, but it’s a lot of the story.

Indeed, much of what is happening to American democracy has its origins in the long-term strategy of the billionaire Koch brothers. The Kochs spent decades promoting right-wing politics in general, with a special role in the takeover of the Supreme Court by the Federalist Society. But an important part of their agenda, and hence that of the right-wing movement as a whole, has always been to keep America burning the fossil fuels on which their wealth rested. If you want to know more, read Lisa Graves’ book on the Roberts Supreme Court, “Without precedent”.

At this point, moreover, it’s not just about normal channels of political influence, nor it just about domestic billionaires. We now live in a time in which U.S. policy is shaped by sheer, naked corruption (enabled in part by the Koch takeover of the courts). Notably, Middle Eastern petrostates, which have a strong interest in blocking the energy transition, have played a huge role in enriching the Trump family.

It’s somewhat surprising that other big-money interests haven’t pushed back. After all, crippling the development of renewable energy is bad for business, and especially bad for the electricity-hungry crypto and AI industries, which ordinarily have a great deal of sway with the Trump administration. But maybe they have decided that special treatment, and especially a green light for their own unethical behavior, matters more than affordable energy.

If there’s any good news here, it is that from a global point of view this malignancy may not matter very much. America is not the world. In fact, at this point we’re responsible for only a small fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions:

So America’s hard turn against renewables and climate action won’t be decisive for the climate future as long as other countries continue to move ahead on green energy, which they are. For the most part, all MAGA will do is help make the United States backward, poorer, sicker and irrelevant.

MUSICAL CODA

Over the past decade, India has built the world’s largest real-time payments system. By using public infrastructure to expand financial inclusion, it offers a model for other developing countries that want to modernize payments without being dependent on a few multinational corporations.

Childhood vaccination is one of public policy’s greatest success stories. People who view the 1950s through rose-colored glasses, seeing them as an era of American greatness, miss many ways in which life was much worse then than now, ranging from gross racism and sexism to high poverty rates among the elderly. One often-overlooked feature of the “good old days” was that many children contracted, and some died from, infectious diseases that have now been almost eliminated — or had been almost eliminated, until today’s right-wing anti-vaccine agitators set the stage for their comeback.

In many ways the Trump administration’s hostility to vaccines is similar to its hostility to clean energy, which I wrote about yesterday. Both policy swerves will kill Americans. If Trumpists succeed in forcing the U.S. to burn more coal, thousands will die from air pollution. Only a year into the Trump 47 administration, there is already a resurgence in almost conquered diseases due to the anti-vax MAGA crusade. Both these sudden policy serves are economically destructive: A 2024 report from the Centers for Disease Control estimated that each dollar spent on childhood vaccination has saved around $11 in societal costs.

Moreover, the Trumpists aren’t content with just cutting off federal funding — they’re determined to stop anyone else from doing the right thing. The Trump administration has imposed a blockade on privately funded wind and solar projects, while RFK Jr.’s allies are pushing to prevent states from implementing childhood vaccine mandates.

And the damage from the assault on vaccines continues to widen. Last week the Food and Drug Administration refused to review Moderna’s new mRNA-based flu vaccine. They didn’t reject it based on evidence; they wouldn’t even look at it, in line with RFK Jr.’s evidence-free, dogmatic assertion that mRNA technology, which gave us Covid vaccines, is useless and harmful. Pharmaceutical companies, understandably, are retreating from vaccine development.

The motivations behind the crusade against clean energy and the crusade against vaccines are also similar. The conspiracy-theorizing hostility to science and expertise in general that underpins both movements also predisposes people to become right-wing extremists, which means that their movements are now in power. The headline on a 2023 article in The Guardian captured this perfectly: “ ‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie’: Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline.”

Last but by no means least, in both cases it’s crucial to follow the money.

It may seem strange to think of the wellness industry as a corrupt and corrupting force comparable to the fossil-fuel sector. But wellness is big business. McKinsey estimates that U.S. spending on wellness is running at around $500 billion a year, while spending on nutritional supplements alone was close to $70 billion last year.

And sellers of nutritional supplements, unlike companies selling pharmaceuticals, are effectively allowed to make false, outlandish claims about what their products do. Here’s how the National Institutes of Health summarized the law:

Dietary supplement labels may include certain types of health-related claims. Manufacturers are permitted to say, for example, that a supplement promotes health or supports a body part or function (like heart health or the immune system). These claims must be followed by the words, “This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”

In other words, it’s OK to peddle snake oil with false medical claims as long as you mumble some content-freeboilerplate.

And where do the snake-oil salesmen peddle their wares? Largely on right-wing media. After all, that’s where they can find customers who have the right mix of anti-intellectualism and disdain for experts. And the snake-oil purveyors are, in turn, a key part of the extreme right’s financial ecosystem.

I wrote about this almost five years ago. The relationship between quack medicine and right-wing extremism has a long history. As the historian Rick Perlstein has documented, extremists have been marketing medical snake oil, and snake oil purveyors have been financially supporting extremism, since the days when misinformation had to be disseminated through paper newsletters. This mutually beneficial relationship continued through the eras of talk radio, cable TV, and now podcasts.

But now we have entered a new era. As many observers have noted, the Trump administration is a kakistocracy: rule by the worst. A history of personal corruption is no longer a bar to high office — it’s practically a requirement.

Under Trump 47, people who have enriched themselves by peddling medical misinformation are no longer just influencing policymakers. They have become policymakers. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who appears to have made millions in salary and book royalties thanks to his anti-vaccine screeds, is now the secretary of health and human services. Dr. Oz is running Medicare and Medicaid.

In short, the kakistocracy is also a quackistocracy.

And the reign of the quacks will condemn thousands, perhaps millions of Americans — many of them children — to gratuitous illness and in some cases death.

MUSICAL CODA