Re: I have yet to figure out why people are afraid that an AI would want to kill off humanity
Cosmic Radiation may very well be the thing that causes a "mutation" in an AI that grants it sentience.
As for Radiation; they are currently many research projects and prototypes of devices that are capable of harnessing radiation and directly converting it into electric current.
Yes, there are a lot of computers for an AI to infect, but there are also 7 Billion+ humans that are interested in not having infected computers and despite having so much raw power, its not really optimized for an AI. Any sentient, and sufficiently intelligent, AI would create its own architecture, specifically optimized for sentience. Besides, while there is a lot of computing power out there, there isn't much that an AI would be able to use. AN AI couldn't use all available, or even a significant portion, of power any computer may have since the owner of the machine would notice and power the computer off. Plus the AI would need to build in a lot of redundancy to account for machines being powered off or connections dropping. So really, an AI would probably only have access to, at most, less than 0.1% of available compute power.