Assuming present day earth.
Imagine someone with access to an exa-scale super computer creates an AI. That AI then becomes sentient and tries to take over the earth.
An exa-scale supercomputer consumes around 20 MW and takes up a huge room to get similar processing power to a human brain. Any human level AI is too big to move.
Therefore the physical agents (robots) of this AI would essentially have to be remote controlled. Basic movement and stuff could be done by local processing, but high-level human type reasoning would have to involve sending video, audio, and sensor data back to the main CPU cluster.
- The first thing the AI does is send out a bunch of phishing emails in order to steal a bunch of people's money.
- Using that money it hires a bunch of unwitting companies to build some power plants, some copies of itself, as well as a robot army. The design is compartmentalized an obfuscated, so no one could see the big picture, and no-one knew what they were building.
We don't know exactly which RF frequencies the AI is using, but they need to have enough bandwidth for video feeds. So lets assume possible carrier frequencies from like 900MHz to like 5GHz.
It seems then that the clear path to keeping the robots away from you is just to jam communications.
The basic requirement for the jammer is that a robot, not bigger than a small passenger car, could not carry communications equipment powerful enough to send a useable video feed through the interference.
Supposing one wanted to make a mobile jammer that fits in the bed of a pickup truck, what is the maximum power level that you can emit without cooking yourself, and still keep the robots at a distance? Also, what would that standoff distance be?
- We are allowed to add EMI shielding to the cab of the pickup truck if needed.
- We are barring the use of optical communications links in this scenario.
- We can assume that the AI is capable of constructing its own communications network, and that just turning off the regular telecom network is not an option.
I think the first step is to figure out the max radiated power level that won't cook the passengers. Assuming that the energy is uniformly spread between 900MHz and 5GHz.
The next step is to figure out how far away that would keep the robots. Keep in mind that the power density of RF signals is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the antennas (W = C / D^2). So as the robot gets closer to the jammer and further away from its own communications network the jammer gains a massive advantage. Weather or not it stops the robot at 10 feet or 10 miles is up to be solved.