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mrobtoday at 8:56 AM0 repliesview on HN

Not just bats. I'm pretty sure humans are already capable of extincting any species we want to, even cockroaches or microbes. It's a political problem not a technical one. I'm not even a superintelligence, and I've got a good idea what would happen if we dedicated 100% of our resources to an enormous mega-project of pumping nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. N2O's 20 year global warming is 273 times higher than carbon dioxide, and the raw materials are just air and energy. Get all our best chemical engineers working on it, turn all our steel into chemical plant, burn through all our fissionables to power it. Safety doesn't matter. The beauty of this plan is the effects continue compounding even after it kills all the maintenance engineers, so we'll definitely get all of them. Venus 2.0 is within our grasp.

Of course, we won't survive the process, but the task didn't mention collateral damage. As an optimization problem it will be a great success. A real ASI probably will have better ideas. And remember, every prediction problem is more reliably solved with all life dead. Tomorrow's stock market numbers are trivially predictable when there's zero trade.