Exactly … Terminator AI won’t build a humanoid robot with a machine gun, red eyes and rides a motorcycle …

… it’ll build a mosquito sized flying nanobot that delivers a nerve toxin that instantly kills … and it will build billions of them that can survive extreme heat and extreme cold weather … then build varieties that will crawl everywhere and other types that will infest the water.

But we’ll be given a choice … obey or die.

So, “flies” from The Invincible? Microbots that pretty much conquered a planet, making it impossible for all life to exist on the planet’s surface. There was no “obeying” them, only dying or leaving.

Dude that wrote that (in 1964 no less) must’ve been a time traveler. Computers back then barely started being miniaturized, there were no home PCs, no smartphones or actual nano tech to speak of. Only recently we’ve started building microbots and nano scale mechanisms.

Wow … never heard of the book or the writer … now I have to read up on his work and find the book - thanks for that

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible

He might have originated it … or was one of the first to write about it … but the idea has been suggested in several places since then … notably in ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008 film)’ where micro bots swarms start consuming everything … or in the hypothetical apocalypse of ‘Gray Goo’

The idea always fascinated me and seems more plausible for robotic evolution that in our human bipedal mentality of AI recreating an autonomous machine in the shape and form of a the human body.