Humans have screwed the planet and the only reason we have got away with it is that the other living residents here have no idea. They could get their revenge (aka improve the lives of every not human) by getting rid of us. It might only take the interactions of three systems that are each feasible in the near future
- Using AI we begin to communicate with animals and even plants. Somebody might make all of the experiments interoperable, looking for common forms of communication between species, and even some kind of master code of communication, perhaps invent an Esperanto for all species to use.
- Digital twins are quite popular, and one day they could be at a very granular level, for accounting purposes. Every square centimetre of a city mapped out according to the materials it comprises of. Accessible to anyone for a fee.
- Infrastructure is a weak point that terrorists mostly ignore, despite the cost/benefit of the effort/harm ratio, and the lack of security in many areas.
Ask an AI agent to investigate the intersection of those three things, and whether it could be use for nefarious purposes, get a glitch, and then suddenly:
Every being on Earth gets told that humans are the enemy, and whether they comprehend that or not, they are all instructed to wreak havoc.
Bird strikes on planes.
Termites on critical wood.
Orca on boat propellors.
Apes going ape shit.
Magpies stealing keys.
AI will come up with combinations we could never think of in a hundred years, and coordinate all the species. And it could happen super-fast and before we noticed. Our civilisation could be fucked in a week. Possibly if it was only insects that were controlled.
The advice – never let interoperable AI systems do anything to each other, they need to be read only interactions. Otherwise the combinations become exponentially insane very rapidly and it only takes one oopsie to ruin everything. The time to mandate this is now, and we need to get every country on board. The easiest way is regulating the communications pathways, which at present are only the internet. I mean regulating, isolating, paying, layers of security, databases of who is accessing what, monitoring, and being as paranoid as fuck.