Meh. People (and ants, incidentally) suffer little from EMPs. We would have to let things get quite out of hand to have arrived at a point where the AI has encased itself in it's own Faraday cage and devised a stand-alone source of power. And even if it wasn't a high altitude nuke set off in desperation that spelled disaster for the machines, it might just be the Sun doing its thing.
Besides that, there's no reason to believe that just because we create a machine which is incredibly good at solving one type of problem that it will then jump to another, entirely different sort of problem solving. For instance (as I just remarked to my wife after reading the article), we have no reason to believe that AlphaGo Zero might invent a horrifically efficient new weapon just because we told it the rules of an ancient Chinese game.
In other words, I have my doubts that any machine created by man will gain any sort of actual, recognizable sentience or self-awareness. Therefore, I believe it would be exceedingly difficult to build a machine which would "want" to learn information outside of its original intended purpose. If that is indeed the case, then as long as we don't ask a machine to find a better way to kill us all...we should be safe.
I hope.
