Well, many individual people, not just &quot;states&quot;, fear terrorists more than car accidents and while it&#x27;s statistically irrational given the number of fatalities due to each cause at a normal year, there is something rational about it.<p>Someone killing a hundred people who would gladly kill a hundred million if they could, and who&#x27;s presumably constantly looking for a way to do it, is more frightening than a car accident, because there can&#x27;t be a huge sudden increase in the rate of car accidents, but there can be and there more than once was a huge sudden increase in the amount of people killed by enemy combatants.<p>(Whether you think terror could ever escalate into a full-blown war is another question, and many don&#x27;t think that, or they think that it is the common countermeasures against terror that result in full-blown wars rather than terror itself, etc. My only point is if it&#x27;s legitimate to fear paperclip maximizers because they&#x27;re &quot;strong AI&quot; and always achieve their goals, it should be legitimate to fear dead-people-like-you maximizers because they&#x27;re a form of wetware intelligence with a good track record of achieving its goals, and they <i>specifically</i> want to kill you, rather than it being a likely subgoal of &quot;make more paperclips&quot;. From a citizen&#x27;s point of view, the state is equally powerless against terror and car accidents, and still the dead-people-like-you maximizer is way more frightening for many and it&#x27;s not stupid to think that.)