If the AI wants to recruit people by role-playing a person, it can pretend to be a busy person who doesn't have time for social life. Or something more creative, like a mad genius suffering from extreme social phobia, a paranoid former secret service agent, or a successful businessman who believes that connecting their online persona with their identity would harm their business. There is no need to appear personally anywhere. It's not like people suspect a random blogger to be an AI in disguise.
Even if you want to create a cult, it's not necessary to meet people personally. Most Falun Gong members have never seen their leader, and probably don't even know if he's still alive. He could easily be an AI with a weird utility function. Maybe some people would refuse to join a movement with an unknown leader. So what? Someone else would join. And when you already have the "inner circle" of humans, other members will be happy to meet the inner circle members in person. Catholics interact with their priests more often than they do with the Pope. And if the Pope would secretly take commands from an AI hiding in the depths of Vatican, most Catholics wouldn't know.
You could pretend to be a secret society trying to rule the world. If you tell humans "we will help you become a president, but in reality you will be our puppet, and you will not even know our identity", many people would be okay with that, if you demonstrate them that you have some power. You could start the trust spiral e.g. by writing a successful thesis for them, giving them a good advice, or just sending them money you stole from somewhere; just to prove that if they do what you want from them, you can deliver real-world benefits in return.
If you want to have a blogger persona, you could start by contacting an already good blogger, and make a deal with them that they will start a new blog and publish your articles under their name (because you want to remain anonymous, and in exchange offer them all the fame). You could choose a smart person who already agrees with most of your ideas, so it would seem credible.
Do what Satoshi Nakamoto did and intentionally hide behind internet anonymity. Do this right and it will make you seem like an ultra-cool uber-hacker cyberpunk.
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!