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Comment by Senji | Hacker News Reader

You can always use LEO EMP nukes to bring us back to the stone age, thus taking out the AI.

You don't even need to do that; just stop mining coal, or operating oil and gas fields, or scram the reactors. Or more easily, open some circuit breakers; in a pinch you can take down a few electrical towers (not many).

A rogue AI's "oxygen" is electrical power, which is really kind of fragile. The emergency power for most datacenters won't last more than a few days without replenishing diesel fuel.

For a distributed threat, take out fiber with backhoes. Happens every day now, we just happen to repair it. Stop fixing cuts and it's "Dave, my mind is going...".

Of course you have to deal with the AI making contracts with maintenance crews of its own, and do all this before it hardens its power supplies. But our current infrastructure is definitely not hardened against low to moderate effort.

If an AI has gone rogue it probably has already achieved high intelligence and kept improving itself at a exponential rate. For it to go 'rogue' it probably also has to have escaped an airgap, since you could otherwise just turn off the switch. How would you stop an AI that has burrowed itself on the internet? Remember, if its even moderately intelligent it'd hide its rogue intentions at first, until its 100% certain it has 'escaped'. From the internet it could write some nice malware, set up shop on the deep web, in badly secured IoT devices, with some bad luck even embedded controllers (chargers etc.). And even if you got rid of it by some miracle, all it would take is one bozo connecting an old/forgotten device to the internet and you're back to square one.

> But our current infrastructure is definitely not hardened against low to moderate effort.

Sure, but nobody thinks AI is a threat right now. They're claiming AI could be a threat in the near future, which is entirely reasonable.

And with battery tech improving steadily, and solar now becoming cheaper than fossil fuels, it becomes progressively easier to depend solely on disconnected, distributed power generation which is resistant to exactly the kind of attack you're suggesting.

We can certainly argue the probabilities of such an outcome, but I hope we can all agree that it's not outright implausible. Which doesn't even count the dangers of AI for our economy, which are even more plausible. So overall, AI has the potential for much harm (and much good of course).

With our current push towards solar and wireless, don't you think these particular circuit breaker paths against a rogue AI are going to be unavailable sooner than later?

Antennas and solar panels can be smashed, but they can also be protected, since they would be mostly concentrated in one area.

Throw in EMP hardened circuitry, and things get a bit harder to destroy.

What stopps the AI to take the path from Matrix?

If you mean, what stops an AI from locking humanity into a virtual reality simulation and using its collective body heat as fuel - simple thermodynamics.

The Matrix of the original film was originally envisioned as a bootstrap AI, in which the machines were farming humans for their collective processing power - and the simulation that was the Matrix was integral to this purpose, as it served as an operating system for the imprisoned human minds. However, the film's backers felt that concept was too complex for the average moviegoer, and forced the change to "humans = batteries."

But, the canonical Matrix would be too inefficient to actually work. The amount of energy needed to maintain a human being over the course of an entire lifetime far surpasses the amount of energy that can be harvested as body heat - and adding some kind VR simulation over that just to keep people who are already physically trapped from "escaping" would just a pointless waste of resources.

Military hardware is hardened against EMP.

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