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Comment by boothby | Hacker News Reader

You don't need a hyperintelligent "AI" to kill all humans; only a moderately effective targeting system on a sufficiently large drone army.

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This is why we need portable and reusable(non-explosive type) EMP devices that can be manufactured and spread among the populace.

Where does the AI get the sufficiently large drone army?

The army would be highly heterogeneous, and almost certainly not built to purpose. Consider the fleet of Tesla vehicles to be one source of ready-to-hack kinetic impactor drones and incendiary devices. But also... militaries around the world are developing murderbot tech. An Amazon delivery drone could drop a brick from 20 feet up.

The self driving vehicles could target food delivery -- not your ubereats, but farm trucks and roads. Destruction of logistic infrastructure results in mass starvation. Individual targets for a complete eradication would take more effort, but a significant cull of the global population seems quite feasible with today's tech.

But folks are also doing virus research with AI. If such a lab gets hacked to make a super-virus, and its containment gets breached by a kinetic impactor, it could be cataclysmic.

I guess where I'm going with my question is that if some ne'er-do-well AI wants a large drone army, then it needs to somehow hack all of those drones unnoticed (or hack the virus lab). Hacking some drones is surely doable, but hacking enough to have a large drone army, especially ones with weapons or explosives, I have major doubts that it's both possible and would go unnoticed.

As far as I know, the fleet of Tesla vehicles is a single OTA away. Hacking individual drones is a highly distributable task. Deployment of prepared hacks could happen in the blink of an eye world 'round.

But I hope you're right! It's not like the world's armies have enough nukes to eradicate all data centers or anything.

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