AI and Critical Infrastructure

The time isn’t far off when critical infrastructure (CI) industries, including the electric power industry, will face overwhelming pressure to start using AI to make operational decisions, just as AI is probably already being used to make decisions on the IT side of the house. Even the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), which drafts and audits compliance with the NERC CIP (Critical Infrastructure Protection) standards, acknowledged that fact in a very well-written document they released last fall.

However, while it’s certain there will be lots of pressure for this in all CI industries, it’s also certain this won’t happen without some sort of regulations being in place, either mandatory (as in the case of NERC CIP) or voluntary, as is likely in CI industries without mandatory cyber regulations in place, like manufacturing. My guess is those industries will develop their own regulations through industry bodies like the ISACs, since the manufacturers themselves are probably as afraid of the harm that aberrant LLMs could cause as everyone else is.

I used to think that AI security regulations for CI would need to be very much in the weeds, with restrictions on how the models can be trained, etc. However, I now realize that trying to do that will be a fool’s errand, since in fact there only need to be four rules:

1.      An AI model can never be allowed to make an operational decision on its own. It can only advise a human, not make the decision for them.

2.      The human can’t face a time limit, so that if they don’t decide to do something in X minutes, the model will decide for them.

3.      If the human doesn’t make the decision at all, the model can’t raise any objections. We don’t need humans succumbing to “peer pressure” from LLMs!

4.      The human can’t be constrained by policies to accept the model’s recommendation. The decision must be theirs alone, including the decision not to do anything for the time being.

Of course, you might be wondering about time-critical decisions, like the millisecond-level “decisions” that are sometimes required in power substations. Those decisions need to be made like they are today: by devices like electronic relays or programmable logic controllers that operate the old-fashioned way: deterministically.

Perhaps one day AI will be so reliable that it can be trusted to make even those decisions on its own. But that day is probably far in the future and may never come at all. Once AI can be as intelligent as the extinct nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, whose genes constitute 60% of the genome of humans and almost all other animals, I might be persuaded to change my mind. 

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