Artificial Intelligence (AI) will soon pose an existential threat to our civilization as it inevitably exceeds human intelligence and becomes uncontrollable. Failure to prepare for this impending crisis will result in humanity's loss of dominance and possibly in our extinction. In The Great Unplugging we explain how we got here, and why conventional regulation will fail.  We then outline solutions to avoid catastrophe by blocking or limiting AI’s access to the internet and to critical infrastructure and banning AGI commercial development. Only by developing contingency plans now can we prepare for the coming AI crisis that will soon sweep over the landscape, threatening everything in its path. 

 The figure below graphically demonstrates the main pathways to catastrophic AI failure, and opens the discussion of how we can protect our critical systems from this rapidly approaching event.