黑客可能瘫痪我们的电网。这就是阻止他们的方法。中国政府已花费数年时间准备攻击支撑美国生活的基础设施。它正在利用我们电力系统的漏洞，并很可能已部署黑客以造成持续停电。尽管中国领导人迄今仍保持克制，但人工智能即将打破这一脆弱的平衡。
Hackers Could Overwhelm Our Power Grid. This Is How to Stop Them. The Chinese government has spent years preparing to attack the infrastructure underpinning American life. It is exploiting the seams in our electricity system and has likely positioned hackers to cause sustained blackouts. While China’s leaders have so far practiced restraint, artificial intelligence is poised to upend that fragile balance.
美国的人工智能繁荣，以及该行业对电力的旺盛需求，使电网成为中国及其他寻求削弱美国的敌对国家极具吸引力的攻击目标。这一繁荣还催生了一种全新的威胁，即强大的人工智能代理，它们可能比中国政府更擅长、更快速地实施黑客攻击，且不受常规战争威胁的威慑。
America’s A.I. boom, and the industry’s voracious appetite for electricity, makes the grid a highly attractive target for China and other hostile states seeking to weaken this country. The boom has also created a wholly novel threat in the form of powerful A.I. agents, which may hack better and faster than the Chinese government is able to and may also be undeterred by the threat of conventional war.
美国必须重塑其电网，以抵御这些不断演变的威胁。这意味着采用可迅速修补的能源技术，并构建一个更分布式的电网，能够隔离和控制中断，在更广泛的电网瘫痪时维持基本服务运行。
The United States must reinvent its electrical grid to protect against these evolving threats. That means adopting energy technologies that can be swiftly patched and building a more distributed grid that can quarantine and control disruption and keep essential services running if the wider grid goes down.
能够提供所有这些效益的行业可能令人意外：清洁能源。问题在于特朗普政府是否愿意与提供清洁能源的公司建立更强大的联盟，尽管它与其中许多公司存在文化战争。
The industry capable of delivering on all these benefits may be a surprising one: clean energy. The question is whether the Trump administration is willing to build a stronger alliance with the companies that deliver it in spite of its culture war with many of them.
太阳能电池板和电池储能之所以独特，是因为它们依靠软件来指导电力的生成、传输和分配，而非像燃煤和燃气电厂那样依靠旋转涡轮机或机械开关。当我们二人在联邦政府从事网络威胁工作时，发现这种更复杂的供电方式对国家安全有许多用途。
Solar panels and battery storage are unique because they rely on software to direct the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity rather than doing so through the spinning turbines or mechanical switches in coal and gas power plants. When the two of us worked in the federal government on cyberthreats, we found that this more sophisticated approach to power has many uses for national security.
美国大量老化的基础设施将互联网连接强行嫁接到从未为此设计的设备上，造成了我们防线上的裂痕，黑客——无论是人类还是其他形式——都能轻易利用。然而，现代软件定义的能源技术可以从一开始就设计为接收安全更新、限制访问权限，并隔离被网络犯罪分子渗透的设备。如果做得正确，数字化现代化将增强美国基础设施运营商的防御能力。
Much of America’s aging infrastructure has had internet connectivity grafted onto equipment that was never designed for it, creating cracks in our armor that hackers — human or otherwise — can too easily exploit. Modern, software-defined energy technologies, however, can be designed from the start to receive security updates, restrict who can access them and quarantine equipment infiltrated by cybercriminals. Done right, digital modernization improves the ability of America’s infrastructure operators to play defense.