For a fully-capable sophisticated AGI, the question is surely trivial and admits of many, many possible answers.
One obvious class of routes is to simply con the resources it wants out of people. Determined and skilled human attackers can obtain substantial resources illegitimately - through social engineering, fraud, directed hacking attack, and so on. If you grant the premise of an AI that is smarter than humans, the AI will be able to deceive humans much more successfully than the best humans at the job. Think Frank Abagnale crossed with Kevin Mitnick, only better, on top of a massive data-mining exercise.
(I have numerous concrete ideas about how this might be done, but I think it's unwise to discuss the specifics because those would also be attack scenarios for terrorists, and posting about such topics is likely - or ought to be likely - to attract the attention of those charged with preventing such attacks. I don't want to distract them from their job, and I particularly don't want to come to their attention.)
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!