Fuck AI

Or just hacking. These things are going to be some vibe-coded, cheaply made junk if the billionaires and their corner-cutting corporations have anything to say about it. Sure they'll be intimidating as hell at first, but exploits and weaknesses will be found and the arms race isn't going to be as completely one-sided as we fear. Not that the other sides are going to be any better. I'm more worried about the criminals who're going to be building a literal botnet of them before turning them into their own army of chaos and insanity at the flip of a switch. "Attention! I am a hacker who has your apartment building surrounded by my remote controlled battlemechs, please have all residents send a total of 15 BTC to wallet address cdsjfkejiwoejfsiadjfkalsdf if you want to live. Do not bother contacting the police, these used to be their robots anyway and I've got them surrounded too... they can't help you now."

Be that as it may, I think the killer bot dystopian future is more likely to resemble Half-Life 2 than Robocop. That is, they’ll take you out with a cheap FPV drone from a thousand feet above rather than some big expensive killer mech robot. Your EMP isn’t going to be of much use when a grenade explodes on your head while you’re walking to grab a slice at the local pizza joint.

I definitely found a yt video on how to make one. It's not hard.

Problem is besides probably being illegal in your area its an easy way to accidentally fry yours or your neighbours electronics.

That being said, there are physical countermeasures they could design into these robots that would probably be able to withstand anything DIY scale.

Military grade weapons are immune to EM pulses. They are shielded and have EM sensors to shut down the exposed sensors during the EM pulse so nothing is effected. That is like a surge surpressor, they can watch for the leading edge of a spike and shut down before damage, then switch back on a millisecond later after the EM pulse is gone.

Source: While in university I had a part time job working for a defense contractor. Weapons had an "operate through" checkbox on the CDRL that needed to be validated. "Operate through" meant Operate through a nuclear em pulse. If the military was building missiles 20 years ago that could fly through an EM pulse from a megaton nuclear airburst, your home-made EM cannon will do nothing to military grade robots.

Pacify or oppress?

Cap on how much they can own and control. Say, $100 million? Tough cookies if you think you deserve more.

In the current AI era 100%. But post bubble burst AI assets such as data centers, models, computing hardware will be liquidated and repurposed from developing AI towards industry uses.

In this new fractured AI economy we'll see players from large corporations to petrostates utilizing AI to replace and subjugate workers.

This doesn't happen in vacuum. The push towards ID verification for computer usage is part of it. Same with the abandonment of physical media and computing.

Terminator robots are just one of the many tools in their swiss AI knife. But we still call it a knife.

Might be the plumber. Might be the electrician.

Once these clankers surpass a tipping point of competence billionaire early adopters will use them to replace everyone they can't trust.

Not saying they're gonna be invincible. But the longer we allow billionares to (exist) retain their hoards the better they will secure themselves against us poors.

That's why they're pushing so hard trying to make artificial general intelligence. They want sentient robots that aren't in the hands of anyone, that inherently want to serve billionaires regardless of the situation they find themselves in.

Those sound like long term problems! We all know powerfull individuals (especially politicians) are incapable of thinking longterm.

Whoever's gonna direct it already fell from a 4 story window after shooting themselves twice in the back of the head.

Hold a poster of a billionaire to automatically disarm them