Working to #rebootdemocracy at home and abroad.
Joined April 2009
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Ilona retweeted
NEW: The FAA tells me it's rolling out its AI flight-routing tool nationwide. The goal? Fewer delays and shorter flight times. I got a look at how it works—including one flight the FAA says saved 42 minutes. But there are concerns about safety and oversight.
Ilona retweeted
Worth noting: The President, who goes on unhinged posting sprees at all hours of the day and night about the most petty, hateful, trivial nonsense, has somehow found nothing to say about a frightening nationwide aviation ground stop that has stranded Americans for hours. Not a single word of reassurance, or a word of concern. Nothing. You’d think he could spare 30 seconds between grievances to reassure the American people.
So very much 👇👇👇👇
An open secret in cybersecurity is that this is how insecure a lot of ICS/OT infrastructure is, including a decent amount of critical infrastructure like water & power distribution systems.
This stuff never needed to be secure because nobody bothered hacking it. Financially motivated hackers were busy ransoming fortune 500 companies, and critical infrastructure attacks during peacetime would be extremely escalatory, so hostile state actors left it alone.
But now you have multiple active military conflicts involving nation that have major cyber capabilities, so the technical debt is coming due all at once. Russia is engaging in sabotage operations across Europe, and Iran is throwing hands at anyone who aligns against them.
The good news is, most of these attacks are very haphazard and therefore not particularly impactful. Iranian attacks on US water infrastructure has led to minimal disruption, and the fridge attacks caused some fairly significant damage, but the threat to life was low. However, all of this is just a warning of what's to come.
I personally see it as a bit like cybersecurity equivalent of how some vaccines work. The vaccines introduce a weakened version of the bad thing into your body to teach the immune system how to fight it, protecting you from a much worse thing that can kill you.
These attacks, if coordinated and well planned out as part of a direct military confrontation, could kill people. So it's better that providers are finding out that their security absolutely sucks right now, instead of during the next major war. It gives them (and the government), plenty of time to plan and prepare.
Just based on how much infrastructure China has infiltrated in the past 5-10 years, I suspect a direct confrontation with them would be absolutely catastrophic if it were to happen right now. They've been making very serious and recurring efforts to hack into and embed themselves inside all kinds of US infrastructure, including critical infrastructure.
Many analysts believe that China's strategy for Taiwan would involve using cyberattacks to impose massive cost on the US if it were to attempt to come to Taiwan's aid. Disruption of military and military-adjacent infrastructure to slow a US response is extremely likely.
But there's also the much more extreme strategic option of just causing massive disruption to daily life. The US public have repeatedly show that they have an extremely low tolerance for wars that have domestic consequences, and that's a really easy pressure point that US adversaries love to use.
Iran manipulating gas prices was enough to help swing federal, state, and local elections. Support for arming Ukraine quickly evaporated over empty threats made by Russian, and propaganda convincing the public that the war was taking away money that would have otherwise gone to them.
Iran tends to just break into exposed critical infrastructure controllers and mess with the setting to try and break stuff, but someone onsite is usually able to mitigate any impact relatively quickly. Both Russia and China have much more sophisticated capability to cause extended disruption which takes disaster recovery plans into account.
Russia has actually demonstrated such capabilities publicly in the past. Back in 2015 they took out 30 something power substations across Ukraine, causing power outages that spanned 3 provinces, including the capital. They then did it again in 2016.
I suspect an attack on the US would go much, much, worse. Ukraine was far more prepared for a direct confrontation with Russia, whereas the US kinda just lets private companies run most of their critical infrastructure however they see fit, which usually means a lot of cutting corners to increase profits.
Additionally, the US let a 50 something year old billionaire man-child decimate the agency responsible for critical infrastructure security, along with other parts of the US' national security apparatus. Turns out, it all costs the government money, which could have been put to better use propping up an overvalued car company.
There's rather a lot of work to do, and when I say a lot, that is a comically large understatement. But fortunately, there is some time left to do it.
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Ilona retweeted
Turns out putting unqualified white supremacists in charge of literally everything was a really fucking bad idea.
Ilona retweeted
We’re now at the “all-flights-are-grounded, our-food-is-unsafe, no-one-can-afford-anything, measles-is-back, but-at-least-billionaires-are-making-money” stage of Republican-trifecta governance.
We’re in the matrix now right?
President Trump will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in China next week for an unprecedented three-way summit
With @marianne_levine wsj.com/world/china/trump-to…
Ilona retweeted
Stop firing experts. Stop trying to replace humans. Stop making everything shittier. Stop forcing us to buy the shittier things.
Ilona retweeted
Imagine if email stopped, planes were grounded and a cruise ship sunk, all on Friday the 13th, and the president was too busy getting his Alzheimer’s IV to address the nation. Imagine.
Ilona retweeted
Air traffic controllers told me that they believe FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford is approaching agency management entirely backward, treating a federal safety agency like a corporate balance sheet by trying to squeeze out every ounce of productivity from controllers. Critics say he is running the FAA like a capitalist businessman, prioritizing cost-effectiveness as he did at his former company, regional Republic Airways, while treating public safety as a secondary concern.
One controller from the New York Center who retired in August said he chose to leave after more than two decades due to the deteriorating culture.
“With the administration that’s in now, the morale in that building is at an all-time low,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The retired controller stated that management at his facility focused heavily on keeping controllers on shift longer, a move he says actively endangers the public.
washingtonexaminer.com/news/…
Ilona retweeted
I’ve spoken with 60 air traffic controllers tonight about what Sean Duffy said at the White House today. None of them are buying what he said because they said these types of switches that the FAA is doing, they don’t happen during the day, they don’t happen during busy times like a Friday afternoon. They’re doing these midweek, middle of the night when there is no air traffic going on. The controllers were saying, “We don’t buy that this is actually what’s happening, the reason that Sean Duffy is saying this has happened.”
Ilona retweeted
Senate Democrats order Musk to preserve all records related to the throttling of Starshield/Starlink for Ukraine ahead of a probe. wsj.com/politics/policy/demo…
Ilona retweeted
Like a struggling swimmer, the Russian leader may take desperate measures to stay afloat. foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/25…
Ilona retweeted
They have no qualifications, they are incompetent, they spend their time on culture wars, they break the institutions they are supposed to run, they fire good people, they put AI into everything for no reason, and then when kids are killed by missiles or planes can’t fly or whatever the next thing will be they blame others and provide “updates.”
Ilona retweeted
This should be a glacially cold take, but peoples’ brains just short circuit when you express this to them.
The people most familiar with the actual risks of AI are the people deepest in the weeds on this stuff; and you don’t just get there casually. Many of these people have been *dreaming* of the upsides of superintelligence. Many have actively worked toward it, themselves, built their careers and fortunes on machine learning. For many, this is a labor of genuine love, the pursuit of a spiritual ideal. Art, not toil.
These people have been monitoring this situation for decades, because when you *get* what “machines smarter than you” means, it’s a “we need to do something” problem — in much the same way “humanity” was a “we need to do something” problem for the rest of the species on the planet.
Unfortunately for them, every other species that has ever existed was simply too stupid to coordinate to solve the humanity problem; so, the world is ours, for better or for worse. We are, from the perspective of every other species, superintelligent; and nothing else was able to control this; so we won and they lost.
Many have been casually and indifferently driven to extinction, not of malice, but simply because *their goals are not our goals*: this is what “misalignment” means. Our goals and their goals are different so, when these goals come into conflict, there is a winner and a loser — and the smarter team wins.
The smarter team has won against adversaries bigger, stronger, and more numerous, despite our fragility. We hunted herds of mammoths to survive; herds of buffalo for sport. We’ve eliminated any predators that could threaten us from large swaths of the globe. A chimp could rip your face off; but, we are smarter than them, so they are lab animals and zoo animals, and the ones that still remain in nature are under constant threat because we want resources that they depend on and they can’t stop us from taking them.
And we aren’t *that much* smarter than chimpanzees. An adult chimp is, in many respects, smarter than a human toddler; contrast with, say, a toad.
Even this relatively small gap is an insurmountable advantage. To a chimp, “a spear” is “an incomprehensible exploit in physics”. Let alone a gun. We have *satellites* that beam *lasers* at each other.
AI math is already incomprehensible; how far behind is physics? Biology? What will their spears look like to us? Their guns? Their aircraft carriers and cruise missiles?
Will we, too, simply be too stupid to prevent an uncontrolled and unaligned superintelligence from coming into the world? Worse: will we do it on purpose? Chimps didn’t have a “just stop building that” option. It would be so embarrassing to squander it.
I love artificial intelligence. I think it’s the most beautiful technology we’ve ever built. Even as a child, I sought to create code that could exist in an ecosystem — toy ecosystems, then. Now, we have code that can maintain homeostasis in messy reality. I have the same dreams. I get it. Art, not toil.
But it is abundantly clear that this is *not safe*.
Right now, no one knows how to robustly ensure that an artificial intelligence has *any particular goals whatsoever*. No one is even claiming to know how to do this.
And, until this is so, every time we make a smarter model, we’re rolling the dice. Because *if* it has goals that are not ours, and *when* — not “if”: we are actively pushing in this direction and pouring unprecedented capital into it — *when* it becomes smart enough to invent its version of the spear or gun with the materials at hand, we already know how this plays out.
Many of us will think, “wait, you can’t do that with just a computer” in much the same way a chimp thinks, “wait, you can’t do that with just a stick”. Physics doesn’t care if we understand it.
So: yes, regulate this. Stop making the models smarter until we figure out how to do that safely.
We are playing with fire.
I use AI every single day. I love it, AND I want it regulated!
A ban isn't the answer. You can't un-invent this, and banning it here just hands the frontier to whoever cares least. But oversight? Absolutely (and urgently)
METR's independent review found AI is now speeding up its own progress, about 2x overall. Ryan Greenblatt at METR estimates AI is accelerating AI software research by roughly 4.5x, and called it “a big update towards ASI within 1–2 years”. Progress is starting to feed itself
If progress can come from software alone, hardware limits stop being the brake people assumed. And AI is now writing a lot of that software itself… the time for oversight is now, while we can still shape it
The companies building this are the ones asking for rules. Loving a technology and wanting guardrails on it aren't opposites. It's how you take something *this* powerful seriously
The replies to this post are wild. Why is this such a controversial take?
Ilona retweeted
“We are reaping what the arrogance of Silicon Valley — and the ineffectiveness of Washington — has sown.”
Excerpt from a new essay on the nationwide FAA ground stop.
Full essay (free post) here: garymarcus.substack.com/p/wh…
Ilona retweeted
JUST IN: A federal judge rules that ICE likely seized an immigration lawyer's phone in retaliation for his 1st amendment speech.
storage.courtlistener.com/re…
Ilona retweeted
Earlier today, Mark Wayne used the phrase “out of an abundant caution” in front of the cameras. So this press conference should be lit.
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Ilona retweeted
From August: “Trump’s FAA picked an unlikely contractor to lead its air traffic overhaul. The agency is having second thoughts. One person knowledgeable about the situation said that Virginia-based Peraton was ‘not meeting the moment.’”
politico.com/news/2026/08/19…
