[narrator]

When AI gets smart enough to do bad things there will definitely be a lockdown. What happens when you can program your robot to commit crimes for you? You won't be able to load certain types of programs by law. They are already doing this with geofencing for drones.

[Buttons840]

I disagree. It may be a convenient narrative for those who want to lock down computers, even on the desktop, but remember that our desktop computers have had intelligent agents capable of committing crimes for decades, and it hasn't been a big problem all things considered. Of course, by "intelligent agent" I'm referring to the animal that operates the computer by pushing buttons.

If machine learning and other advanced AI produces sophisticated programs capable of assisting in these crimes, or of performing the crimes automatically, how will that change anything? The human pushing buttons committed a crime and got caught, the advanced AI committed a crime and got caught, what's the difference? Either way the person responsible for the computer is punished.

Of course, if computers reach super-human intelligence, then all bets are off, and having access to general purpose computers might be the least of our concerns.

[gmueckl]

You neglect the scale of the damage done in the various crimes. Yes, the person giving the command is tesponsibke, but law enforcement also includes crime prevention. This means keeping the most terrible crime supporting stuff out of the hands of the people (guns, anyone?) and dissuading people from doing bad things.

A network commected computer rarely leads to more than deleted files and leaked data elsewhere. In the hands of capable, well funded hackers, devastating damage could be done to infrastructure these days, but few actors are interested in that and they mostly exist in a space where conventional law enforcement is powerless.

An autonomous roving robot that could be patched to turn into a murderbot is facilitating crimes of a completely different magnitude. There will be political will to rein that in as soon as the possibility becomes real.

This will have an effect on self driving cars as well: these will be locked down completely, mostly by political mandate. And the cause will be reckless hackers building uncertified firmware that is either of low/unproven quality or capable of breaking the law on request in some reckless form or other.

[ACow_Adonis]

What on earth are viruses, botnets, worms, algo trading, etc?

Computers partaking in actions with consequences has been going on for ages already...