The Unplugging Project | The Great Unplugging, Inc.

The argument

This is procurement, not prophecy.

Power, water, hospitals, transport, and finance are being wired to systems that no one fully understands. That is happening now, on purchase orders.

Three things follow.

Automated systems in critical infrastructure will fail at some point. Every complex system does. The real question is whether the failure is recoverable.
Rules alone do not make a system recoverable. A regulation on paper does not restore a substation at three in the morning.
Recovery has to be designed before it is needed. Not during. Not after.

The book put the same point more bluntly: the worst thing we can do is grow dependent on these systems, and that is exactly what we are doing.

The Unplugging Project set out the practical side in four phases, meant to run in order.

Planning and staging. Everything that can be done before a crisis: restoring legacy communications, hardening utilities, setting up local networks, and agreeing in advance on what would count as a trigger.

Unplug and purge. A short, declared emergency period. International links come down, domestic addressing is reset, and critical services switch to their standby plans.

III

Rebuilding. The national network is reassembled piece by piece, with each server and domain vetted before it is allowed back on.

Running isolated. Near-normal function under strict limits on bandwidth and file size, with the ability to repeat the purge kept in practice.

Chapters five through seven work through what that means in practice for communications and transport, for the power grid, municipal water, and pipelines, and for banking, elections, schools, and emergency services.

Where the law now stands

The AI Kill Switch Act

Introduced 23 July 2026 by Representatives Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran, the bill would:

Require shutdown capability. Covered developers would have to maintain the technical ability to throttle, suspend, or fully shut down a covered AI system.
Authorise federal intervention. A graduated response framework, from slow down to full shutdown, ordered through the Department of Homeland Security.
Preserve the evidence. Incident reporting and forensic records, so failures get studied rather than buried.

The book made the timing argument in one line: there is no right time to act, there is only early, and too late. On that basis this bill is early, which is the only useful thing to be. We support the attempt. Two years of working the problem also left us with a finding the bill does not account for.

The caveat

Why passing it will not finish the job.

Chapter three set out seven reasons regulation struggles with this technology. None of them have gone away.

Speed. The technology moves faster than the process built to govern it.
Borders. Development is global; enforcement is national.
Disagreement. The social questions are broad and contested, so consensus is slow.
Expertise. Policymakers without technical grounding tend to stall rather than act.
Incumbents. The parties with the most at stake are the ones being regulated.
Benefits. Every restriction is read as a cost to medicine, climate work, or defence.
Capture. The same tools can be turned on the regulators themselves.

This is not an argument against the bill. It is an argument for not treating its passage as the end of the work.

What we learned

The limits of containment.

Unplugging works when there is one thing to unplug. The 2024 picture was a small number of powerful systems, in a small number of places, reachable by a small number of decisions. Capability has since spread. Weights get copied. The work splits across vendors, borders, and machines that answer to nobody in particular.

The monster is not breaking down the gates. We are inviting it in.

That line is from the book, and it has aged better than the plan around it. Two parts of the plan have not held up. Phase II assumed a government could take control of internet addressing and pull the international links inside a few days. That was always a heavy lift, and it gets heavier as capability moves off the networks we could actually cut. It also assumed the public would accept a declared shutdown on the strength of a warning, before the damage everyone could see. We no longer think either assumption is safe to build on.

Containment is worth building. We no longer believe it is enough to rely on.

What has held up is the operator half. Chapters five through seven are still the part of this work we would defend hardest, because a shutdown order tells a company to stop and says nothing about what a hospital, a water district, or a grid operator does the next morning. That question is not answered anywhere in current policy, and it is the reason this book stays published.

The full record, including the positions we have moved beyond, lives in the archive. Our focus has moved to Algorism, where the question is conduct rather than control.

The book

A living document.

The Great Unplugging, version 1.0, was published in May 2024, written by John Jerome and Bruce M. Williams with a group of contributors. It is aimed at emergency managers, utility operators, and policymakers, and it claims no special authority: the authors describe themselves as concerned people with relevant training who wrote the plan because nobody else had.

You can read the whole thing here, free, with no email required.

Read the book (PDF) Also on Amazon