See this brief, "Of Rats and Superempowerment" to put this into context. It implies that the following is inevitable:
"The autonomy of robots today is similar to that of an insect," snorts Guillot, a researcher at France's Institute for Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR), one of the "Psikharpax" team.
Rather than try to replicate human intelligence, in all its furious complexities and higher levels of language and reasoning, it would be better to start at the bottom and figure out simpler abilities that humans share with other animals, they say. These include navigating, seeking food and avoiding dangers.
And, for this job, there can be no better inspiration than the rat, which has lived cheek-by-whisker with humans since Homo sapiens took his first steps. But the European researchers believe that Psikharpax is unique in its biomimickry, sophistication of sensors and controls and software based on rat neurology. Data from these artificial organs goes to Psikharpax's "brain," a chip whose software hierarchy mimicks the structures in a rat's brain that process and analyse what is seen, heard and sensed.
By the end of the next decade, rat intelligence equivalent software that can interact successfully with complex environments will likely be an ubiquitously available low cost commodity. In robots (worse, in software bots on "captured" PCs) or not, this allows for torrential levels of self-replication and thereby individual super-empowerment. LOL: Willard redux?
Think: Navigating complex defenses, seeking vulnerable systempunkts and causing cascades of failure.