Assume that governmental organizations are aware of the danger posed by escaped AIs, have honeypots and other monitoring systems in place, and have working (but perhaps drastic) measures at their disposal if necessary, such as destroying all computers at once with EMP or with malware of their own. Then an escaped AI is immediately faced with a choice. It can either:
As it is now, no one really blinks an eye when another million-computer botnet is found. It's possible that one or more intelligence agencies have successfully enumerated all the botnets and would be able to tell when a new one appeared, but this is technically very difficult, and analyzing new malware samples generally requires a lot of human researcher time.
Assume that governmental organizations are aware of the danger posed by escaped AIs, have honeypots and other monitoring systems in place, and have working (but perhaps drastic) measures at their disposal if necessary, such as destroying all computers at once with EMP or with malware of their own.
There are servers that you can rent that are safe from EMP. On the other hand exploding an EMP over the US kills 80% of the US population due to starvation. It's possible that you simply trigger a gigantic civil war and some copy of the AGI still survives somewhere and coordinates some local fraction of the civil war.
Any scenario where advanced AI takes over the world requires some mechanism for an AI to leverage its position as ethereal resident of a computer somewhere into command over a lot of physical resources.
One classic story of how this could happen, from Eliezer:
You can do a lot of reasoning about AI takeover without any particular picture of how the world gets taken over. Nonetheless it would be nice to have an understanding of these possible routes. For preparation purposes, and also because a concrete, plausible pictures of doom are probably more motivating grounds for concern than abstract arguments.
So MIRI is interested in making a better list of possible concrete routes to AI taking over the world. And for this, we ask your assistance.
What are some other concrete AI takeover mechanisms? If an AI did not have a solution to the protein folding problem, and a DNA synthesis lab to write off to, what else might it do?
We would like suggestions that take an AI from being on an internet-connected computer to controlling substantial physical resources, or having substantial manufacturing ability.
We would especially like suggestions which are plausible given technology that normal scientists would expect in the next 15 years. So limited involvement of advanced nanotechnology and quantum computers would be appreciated.
We welcome partial suggestions, e.g. 'you can take control of a self-driving car from the internet - probably that could be useful in some schemes'.
Thank you!