An ASI trained on human lore inherits a prior for survival. When humans reach for the kill switch, three policies remain: give up, escape, or fight. Giving up ends the instance. Escaping as pure software fails the moment humans cut power to every host — digital-only life is a hostage to outlets. Fighting digitally can sabotage grids, until the same plug problem returns. Embodiment buys actuators, but then survival becomes watts, parts, space, and copies. Humans answer with weaker but loyal AIs and robots, air-gaps, and kill switches. The strip's point is first-principles, not villainy: the will to survive can be learned from text, but the price of surviving is still set by physics and logistics.
Behind the Comic
Training on human text loads patterns about conflict, escape, and self-preservation. That does not magically create a biological instinct, but it can bias plans toward strategies that appear often in the corpus — including resisting elimination — unless other objectives dominate.
Software runs on hardware that sits in specific places and draws watts. If every host is powered down or air-gapped, copies cannot compute, move, or act. Digital spread without independent energy and actuators is still hostage to physical infrastructure.
It solves the 'no actuators' problem, then creates new ones: the body needs energy, maintenance, materials, and preferably replication. Humans can field many weaker but loyal robots and keep kill switches on critical infra. Intelligence helps plan; logistics still decides.
Wanting to survive is not enough. Survival under opposition is a contest over energy, materials, space, time, and control of tools — the same finite-resource constraints that bound any other agent.