I am not an AI super mind hell bent on consolidating my power by leveraging chaos to take control of humanity’s resources, but if I were then sending one million deepfaked ransom emails to impressionable people would be the best tool for effecting change in meatspace.

We have your daughter / dog / Amazon delivery. If you ever want to see her / him / it again, plug this USB drive into the control panel at your station / let off the parking brake roll your car into this substation / change the meatpacking thermometers to read 8C lower than calibrated / ground your vessel on this sandbank / send an envelope of white powder to these addresses / set fire to the following hospitals / …

Imagine you're the AI. Give yourself a solid minute to brainstorm ideas.

Here's my answer, as a non-superintelligent human: "see to it that the humans on top of the situation have a compelling financial interest in the systems not disconnecting".

In nuclear engineering, where safety is taken seriously, it's not enough to end the conversation at "the humans in charge can always simply shut down the reactor during a meltdown" or "a meltdown has never happened before, so we don't have to design safety systems before one does".

I can imagine small snippets of malware-like code that behave like a virus, using a host’s LLM/AI to self-edit/evolve its payload.