The AI starts to search for zero day exploits in common computer hardware. It uses those to build a big botnet. It is soon in computers all around the world and shutting down the internet of a single country isn't enough.
In our world there are many instances of civil war. In some of those it will be possible to impersonate army commanders and the AI can control combat troops. It makes sure that the soldiers are well payed and stay alive. The AI controlled troops will win against their opponents because the AI controls everything. The AI can also shield a bunch of troops in a way that it controls the complete information flow to those troops.
The Khmer Rouge did rule without the food soldiers knowing the people at the top of the organisation. The AI can simply pretend that it's a human that lives outside of the combat zone. As long as soldiers get payed they are likely to be loyal.
There are already plenty of US conspiracy theorists who fear that the government wants to turn down the internet. It should be easy to sell them the idea that the US government makes up the story of a dangerous AGI to switch of the internet. The AI can expose corruptions scandals to drive the news cycle. It has a massive power to distract human from fighting it.
In a society where a lot of people don't believe in the existence of evolutions an AGI can exist while a substantial portion of the population believes it doesn't exist. It simply needs plausible cover stories for everything it does and enough stories that pit different groups of humans against each other that they are too busy to think about the AGI.
In every country on earth the AGI will use slightly different strategies to increase the amount of power it has over humans. In China nobody suspects an AGI at work if an SMS fails to be transferred over the air. It will be like some government filter catched it.
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!