This sounds really interesting! Generally it seems that most people either believe AI will get power by directly being ordered to organize the entire world, or it will be some kind of paper-clip factory robot going rogue and hacking other computers. I am starting to think it will more likely be: Companies switch to AI middle managers to save $$$, then things just happen from there.
Now one way this could go really mazy is like this: All AI-models, even unique ones custom made for a particular company are based on some earlier model. Let's say Wallmart buys a model that is based on a general Middle Manager Model.
This model now has the power to hire and fire low-level workers, so it will be very much in their interest to find out what makes the model tick. They can't analyse the exact model (which is being run from a well guarded server park). But at some point somebody online will get hold of a general Middle Manager Model and let people play with it. Perhaps the open-source people will do all sorts of funny experiments with it and find bugs that could have been inherited by the Wallmart model.
Now the workers at Wallmart all start playing with the online model in their spare time, looking around AI-forums for possible exploits. Nobody knows if these also work on the real model, but people will still share them, hoping to be able to hack the system: "Hey, if you try to report sick on days when you anyway had time off, the Manager will give you extra credits!" "Listen, if you scan these canned tomatoes fifty times it triggers bug in the system so you will get a higher raise!" Etc.
The workers have no way to know which of the exploits work, but everybody will be too afraid of loosing their jobs if they are the only one NOT hacking the AI. Wait for a few years and you will see the dark tech-cult turning up.
Going off on a tangent here about the 'religion of peace.'
When discussing migration to Europe the relative crime rates of muslim immigrants often pop up, so once I decided to sit down and look them over. In Denmark, which keep pretty meticulous statistics, migrants from muslim countries have a roughly 2.5x higher violent crime rate than the mean. This might sound like a lot but then I started comparing it with other countries:
If we just look at homicides (the crime statistic that most people care about and which is hardest to fake), Denmark has a very low level (1 pr 100 000 inhabitants pr year), and most middle eastern countries have one of 2 to 3 if we exclude the ones currently engaged in civil war. So the rate of migrants was actually exactly what you should expect if people kept to their cultural norms.
Now compare this to places like the US ( 6 pr 100 000), or mexico (almost 30). Even if we look at the state of Minnesota which was mainly settled by Scandinavians we find a rate of 3, higher than most peaceful middle eastern countries.
If you look further east to Malaysia and Indonesia you will find even lower homicide rates. Malaysia has around 1/5th the rate of neighboring Thailand.
Though there might be more reasons for these statistics, it does strike me that Islam might be a religion of peace in as far as it has found a simple 'peace heuristic' that make people less likely to kill each other than in other comparatively wealthy or well functioning places.
Sometimes changing such spaghetti towers can become a beautiful art all in itself. Like a combination of Jenga, Mikado and those mind boggling topology riddles.
Take for example the rules of D&D. They started simple, then new rules was added in the most spaghetti like way imaginable (Okay, you can play a wizard. But then you are not allowed to wear any armor! You can still wear a backpack because otherwise it is inconvenient. And no Backstabbing with a longsword!) The problem is that for every arbitrary spaghetti rule, somebody will have build a beloved around it. So you got to admire the game designers who untangled the spaghetti tower of rules version 3.5 into the slightly less tangled and more playable version 5 without hurting anybody's feelings too much.