AI of the caliber of Artificial General Intelligence Experience Power Outages Leaving Humans in Awe
In an increasingly interconnected world, the reliance on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has become a cornerstone of critical infrastructure, from healthcare and finance to transportation and governance. However, this heavy dependence also brings the risk of widespread systemic failures, economic damage, and significant disruptions should an AGI outage occur.
The consequences of such an event could be far-reaching and devastating. As demonstrated by the 2024 CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage that affected 8.5 million Windows systems worldwide, vendor or platform dependency can lead to cascading failures across sectors like healthcare, finance, and aviation, causing losses in the billions.
Moreover, critical networks, including satellite internet providers like Starlink, face disruptions that can isolate communities and affect data traffic globally, showcasing how single points of failure can propagate across systems. Security vulnerabilities and data breaches are also a significant concern, with accelerated AI software deployment leading to outages, breaches, and technical debt, further exacerbating financial and data integrity losses.
To mitigate these risks, several preparations and strategies are being proposed. Building resilience through redundancy, diversification of vendors and platforms, robust risk management, and proactive regulatory compliance are key to ensuring critical societal functions continue to operate even during an AGI outage.
Encouraging diversity in AI infrastructure components reduces the risk of single-vendor outages cascading globally. Firms promoting such resilience, such as ArcherPoint and Akamai, demonstrate the benefit of multi-vendor strategies and "secure-by-design" principles.
Laws like the EU's NIS2 mandate third-party risk management, making infrastructure resilience a critical operational priority rather than an option. Robust testing and release quality control are also essential to prevent outages caused by rushed deployments or misconfigurations.
Understanding deep interdependencies among AI services, data replication mechanisms, and access controls is crucial to identify failure points before cascades occur. Systems need rapid incident management and fallback solutions enabling continued operation even during AGI or AI platform failures, inspired by how some remote networks reverted to less dependent connectivity during outages.
In conclusion, a widespread AGI outage would highlight the extreme vulnerability due to the high degree of AI integration in global systems. Preparing for such an event requires a combination of technical design for resilience, diverse supply chains, regulatory compliance, and rigorous operational protocols to avoid systemic collapse and maintain critical societal functions.
Recent events, such as the eight-hour outage of the globally popular ChatGPT by OpenAI on June 10, 2025, serve as a reminder of the potential impact of an AGI outage. As people become increasingly dependent on AGI for various aspects of their lives, including work and personal decisions, the need for robust preparations becomes even more crucial.
The future of AGI research aims to advance it to either artificial general intelligence (AGI) or artificial superintelligence (ASI). However, the potential downside of AGI outages should be prepared for, as it may lead to cognitive atrophy and psychological instability. The worry is that whoever lands on AGI first might horde it, creating a divide between the AGI haves and have-nots.
As Socrates once said, "To find yourself, think for yourself." Relying on AGI may lead to a darkness underlying the human soul, as we won't be able to find our inner selves. The impact of an AGI downtime or blackout could be enormous and severely harmful. An entire global outage of AGI is a conceivable possibility.
AGI is AI that is considered on par with human intellect and can match our intelligence. Some argue that people will actually become smarter due to AGI, while others worry that we may lose our ability to think for ourselves and find our inner selves. AGI will not be perfect and will experience downtimes or outages.
We have not yet achieved AGI, and it is unknown whether we will reach it in the future. ASI is AI that has gone beyond human intellect and would be superior in many if not all feasible ways. The human mind may weaken due to reliance on AGI, leading to cognitive atrophy. AGI will be involved in running important parts of our collective infrastructure, and human workers may not be adept at managing without AGI.
Questions about AGI outages include whether people will stop working, if the world's infrastructure will halt, if AGI will suffer during downtime, if evildoers will purposefully disrupt AGI, and what safeguards can protect AGI. People will become increasingly dependent on AGI for cognitive tasks, gradually outsourcing their thinking to AGI. AGI is likely to be widely utilized throughout the globe and used by people of all countries and languages.
There are concerns about psychological mental properties, such as emotional stability, being at risk during an AGI outage. The potential impact of an AGI outage is enormous, and preparations must be made to ensure the resilience and continuity of our critical infrastructure.
