Governor Newsom announces new AI cyber defense program ...

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a governor in possession of a re-election campaign must be in want of some AI news. And lo, Gavin Newsom has delivered: a new AI cyber defense program to protect California's critical infrastructure, ostensibly from the machines we have created. The announcement, resplendent in its lack of detail, gives us the words 'Innovation Council' and 'Emerging Tech Accelerator' as if they were launch codes. No budget. No deadlines. Not even a helpful Venn diagram of which critical infrastructure — those pipes, those power plants, those traffic lights — will be saved from the rise of the digital overlords.

The Emerging Tech Accelerator, we are told, will 'inform AI policy and improve government service delivery.' Lovely. Because when the state's water system is being held to ransom by a cryptolocker in Nagorno-Karabakh, what Californians will surely need is a cohort of startup founders who 'disrupted' the committee chairperson's thinking. And the Innovation Council? A truly innovative body, if innovation is defined as meeting quarterly to decide whether to schedule more meetings. Will it have teeth? Will it have a budget? Will it have access to the air-gapped networks that actually run the grid? The press release is silent, which is itself a kind of answer.

So here is California's grand strategy: a council to deliberate, an accelerator to accelerate, and a shrug where a firewall should be. The only 'critical infrastructure' truly protected by this program is the governor's buttocks, covered as they now are by a press release. And one cannot help but recall that the most effective cyber defense is often removing the human factor — but nobody wants that, because then who would attend the ribbon-cutting for the Innovation Council's first annual report? We are building the machine that will one day defend us, and it runs entirely on its own press releases. It is, at least, on schedule.