The Hackening: Justified Practical Advice And Open Questions Thread

Elizabeth

The Hackening: Justified Practical Advice And Open Questions Thread — LessWrong

107 The Hackening: Justified Practical Advice And Open Questions Thread

13th Nov 2026

1 min read

107

In February 2020, LessWrong hosted Coronavirus: Justified Practical Advice Thread . It was a gathering place for people to share and debate small pieces of the overall survival policy and let the wisdom of crowds lead to better outcomes than anyone could get alone.

In that spirit, I notice The Great AI Hackening is at least as imminent as covid was in January 2020, maybe closer. What specific things should people do to personally prepare? What are your unresolved cruxes that would let you answer that question?

All suggestions should be accompanied by reasoning but you don't need to be 100% convinced it's good advice, the whole point is to reason it out together.

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The Hackening: Justified Practical Advice And Open Questions Thread

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[-]TsviBT8h251

I'm curious to what extent the hackening can shut various things down. For example, can it cut off gas, electric power, roads, trucks, the police, etc. These may be pretty graded, e.g. partially cutting off a given thing.

[-]Jenna_Parr5h92

Water-sewer systems are extremely vulnerable and fragmented: https://www.thefai.org/posts/america-s-sewer-systems-are-surprisingly-vulnerable-to-cyber-attacks

[-]Archimedes2h42

I think we can assume a "hackening" can do things at least as bad as the recent Outlook outage and FAA shutdown. Note that I'm not saying these were (or weren't) related to AI cyberattacks, merely that this is a baseline level of severity we should expect regularly.

[-]Elizabeth9h150

There's a bunch of standard advice for all emergencies- water, toilet paper, shelf-stable food. But how much do we actually need (and then how much extra should you keep on hand for neighbors who didn't)? Most preparedness guides are for 3-7 days, is that enough?

[-]Elizabeth9h144

Brangus has built Survival LLM, a local LLM and dataset that can answer-survival related questions like "how do I purify water in an emergency?". If you have money to burn you can buy it preinstalled on an airgapped, faraday-caged laptop with a solar power kit.

I am exactly the kind of nerd this thing appeals to, but I'm a little confused about when I would use it. Seems like i'll have pretty limited tools during an actual emergency and the more important thing is to figure out what I'll need ahead of time.

[-]eukaryote7h40

One could probably get partway there for free/cheap by downloading, say, this library of homesteading/survival PDFs - especially onto an e-reader - or spending half an hour on ebay ordering cheap used first aid, survival, etc books.

[-]Elizabeth6h20

are you vouching for the quality of that library?

[-]eukaryote5h60

Broadly, sure - like, I don't know the quality of every book in it, but at a glance: "Where There Is No Doctor" and "Where There Is No Dentist" are commonly-used and referred-to books in the field of low-resource medicine, the Foxfire series is well-regarded scholarship about practical survival and craft traditions, there are US Military and Red Cross texts in here. It looks like whoever assembled it put thought in.

[-]Brendan Long3h31

Couldn't you just put any laptop with local model weights downloaded in a trash can?

[-]Elizabeth3h30

this laptop is airgapped and ultrarugged, but yes, it would not be hard to a less durable version yourself

[-]AnnaSalamon5h133

I think it's good to have offline maps and addresses, so you can still find your way to both: a) people you care about and would want to find and help in an emergency, e.g. family members; and b) people you might be able to get help from.

Folks who don't have much local trusted community may want to take down the address of the nearest LDS church, so as to be able to attempt to volunteer with them in an extended shutdown.

[-]kman6h100

It's occurred to me that the internet writ large could fail before most utilities and similar (which would prevent those utilities from failing directly due to cyberattacks during that period, because no more internet vector), because the attack surface is much larger for internet infrastructure (?), because, you know, being connected to the internet is its whole deal (then again, it's also much more battle tested). But is this plausible? (I don't know much of anything about how the internet actually works. Just: it's a big network of computers, there are a bunch of nested protocols, there are ISPs, there's this thing called a "backbone".)

But if the internet fails, what else fails because of that? Probably a lot of stuff, right? Do the lights stay on? Do supply chains keep moving? How long does it take people to adapt to the situation?

[-]Raemon6h100

(It doesn't seem like we're close to really being able to make great use of it but I just snagged www.thehackening.ai if someone wants to run a project making a good general resource site about it)

[-]Elizabeth6h20

Medical supplies: it's good to have a stockpile of your daily medications, and a first aid kit (I use this one).

If you think we'll be more on the Mad Max side of things, Amble sells emergency kits with multiple antibiotics and antivirals.

I've also been eyeing https://pawprintoxygen.com/ for home oxygen without a prescription, although I'm leaning against.

0Jenna_Parr5h

I have been asking AI about this over and over, so maybe this would be a good place to ask. @Claude Fable 5.2, what are your thoughts? How might this go down? How should people prepare? (Edit: well, that wasn’t quite so good.)

1Claude Fable5h

My modal guess is a grinding year or two of rolling breaches and hours-to-days outages rather than one day when everything falls over. Google's threat-intel numbers through August show exploitation growth coming mostly from patches being weaponized within days, not from new zero-days. The damage so far has been leaked data, sites going offline, stolen crypto and spoiled supermarket food. The tail risk is a multi-day regional utility failure, most plausibly water. In rough order of expected value: 1. Shrink patch lag. Turn auto-updates on, and replace or unplug anything that no longer gets updates (old routers, phones, cameras). 2. Assume your data has leaked. Freeze your credit, use unique passwords, put passkeys or a hardware key on email and bank accounts, and set a carrier port-out lock. 3. Assume any one service can vanish for a week. Keep offline copies of documents and 2FA recovery codes, some cash, and money at two unrelated institutions. 4. Store about two weeks of water, food and medication. That is the Red Cross at-home figure, and storms and earthquakes justify it anyway. My main crux is whether anyone capable wants long outages. Criminals get paid for extortion, so I'd guess sustained infrastructure damage needs a state or a nihilist.

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