Andy Greenberg at Wired in his book Sandworm (2019):

""It would be hard to say we're not vulnerable. Anything connected to something else is vulnerable," Sachs said. "To make the leap and suggest that the grid is milliseconds away from collapse is irresponsible.""

"But to hackers like Sandworm, Lee countered, the United States could present an even more convenient set of targets. U.S. power firms are more attuned to cybersecurity, but they're also more automated and modern than those in Ukraine, with more computer-controlled equipment. In other words, they present more of a digital "attack surface" to hackers than some older systems."

"American engineers, he argued, also have less experience with manual recovery from frequent blackouts than a country like Ukraine. Regional utilities in Ukraine, and even Ukrenergo in Kyiv, are all far more accustomed to blackouts from the usual equipment failures than American utilities. They have fleets of trucks ready to drive out to substations and manually switch the power back on, as Ukrainian utilities did in 2015 when the hackers first hit them. Not every hyper-automated American utility is prepared for that all-hands, on-the-ground manual override. "Taking down the American grid would be harder than Ukraine," Lee said. "Keeping it down might be easier.""

Ukraine recovered relatively fast from the power grid hack because its systems were not fully digitalized. One can hope and pray that computer engineers in the West are smart enough to have good enough digital recovery plans for all possible hacks in the future. Wired:

The Hail Mary Plan to Restart a Hacked US Electric Grid

"On tiny Plum Island, DARPA stages a real-life blackout to put its grid recovery tools to the test."

It was predictable that America would try to patch all weaknesses in its own computerized power grid after the sabotage in Ukraine. So the important question is whether Russia would have revealed its hacking tricks in Ukraine if Kremlin was not confident that it has better tools ready to take out a highly protected electric grid in America.

It's impossible to know what Russia, China or another anti-Western power has planted in the power grids across Europe and North America. To get peace of mind the safest option is to build a non-digital backup system. Expensive indeed, but creating a second power grid will provide many jobs in the West.

Similarily, if we rebuild video stores and game shops it will be possible for people to buy physical copies of movies and computer games, so that they can have entertainment even if the entertainment industry gets hacked, as discussed here.

In general it makes us very vulnerable when we rely only on computers. The book Sandworm describes how it was to live in Ukraine during the hack in 2017:

""It felt like a bad end-of-the-world movie. You're disoriented. You can't understand what to do next. You feel like you've lost an arm and can't function properly," Bondarenko said. "Life went very fast from 'What's new on Facebook?' to 'Do I have enough money to buy food for tomorrow?' "

The 2017 hack occurred in the summer. The winter is much deadlier without electricity.

Humans lose skills and expertise if not continually using and maintaining them. It appears like Flight 447 crashed because Airbus pilots rely so much on automated systems that their aviation skills become rusty.

Passenger aircraft falls out of sky - What happened to Flight 447? | 60 Minutes Australia

Boeing by the way has (or used to have?) a different aviation philosophy than Airbus, so pilots in Boeing jets are (or were?) generally better at flying manually.

Maybe pilots should use VR gear to train emergency procedures when sitting for hours doing nothing in the cockpit during long-haul flights?