I don't even think AI has to have physical presence to do significant harm. How many worldwide systems depend on computers. Think of all the planning and deployment and management systems like food shipping; water, gas, and electricity management; safety systems for planes and boats and traffic lights. Imagine the chaos if all the banks got reset to zero a la Fight Club where they blow up all the credit union datacenters. They probably wouldn't even have to blow them up, just zero them out. You wouldn't have to take out everything, just disrupt everything long enough to freak people out and disable communications and we would be in so much trouble. AI is finding 20 year old bugs in the Linux kernel... and people are now pumping out AI slop absolutely riddled with bugs. Also, AI could just take over communications: send everyone maliciously bad messages so coordination becomes impossible to believe. Imagine what would happen if you just disabled text messaging for a week or worse sent everyone evacuation messages and sent everyone somewhere else.
This would probably cause immense damage. Our society is extremely dependent on our digital infrastructure working. Grocery chain logicistics, the medical system, the police force, and so on...
100%. I hope it doesn't take that much foresight to do something like "crash power grids globally" and imagine what the world looks like at that point.
