>The amount of resources and thus damage that an individual in a basement can do is rather limited.

It is for now. We will get to a point where a negative utilitarian with accesses to genome synthesis technology will be able to kill tens of millions. And this seems like it could become pretty feasible, even from a basement.

You can do that in a basement without AI. And I think, given the topic, that's all I'm going to say on the matter.

Right. Currently in order to do state-of-the-art AI, you need a lot of _computers_ and a lot of _data_. Neither of these is easy to obtain by an individual in a basement.

We would need to consider, however, access to finished products (like trained models). In some cases in the future, having access to the appropriate model might be as dangerous as handing someone a nuke.

How hard would it be for someone to assemble a indiscriminate "killer drone," given the appropriate image recognition and flight control models?

Image recognition and flight control makes a drone, but probably not a killer drone, as that would presumably require some sort of munitions - like a gun or explosives. So it might be efficient enough to just limit access to those parts?

People with low education levels can show you how to build all sorts of things that go bang. Someone with an engineering background could vastly improve on a lot of designs. If you could make a small, lightweight projectile weapon that can be 3d printed then you have what you need.

My background is an engineering role in the military and my current path is CS. I don't think it's unfeasible that an individual could build a crude drone that would kill a single person. Building an entire swarm of death robots is a different story.

AWS makes it pretty easy to get a lot of computers, at least.

It is really easy to detect nuclear abuse. It's somewhat harder to detect chemical abuse. I have no idea how you're going to detect AI abuse without pretty much spying on everyone.

I guess once we have T-1000s coming back to kill people we'll know that it's time to start putting the brakes on AI.