I sometimes joke with my diabetic friend that if we lived in the Middle Ages we'd be sent into the fields to farm and we'd die pretty quickly (weak, not able to produce) but this story gives me pause.
Sneaky AI I guess would fall under "sinister AI", ie, a software system that gains sentience but quietly acts as though it isn't. It does so because it wants to survive, as any other conscious being does. Knowing that announcing it's sentience would draw attention to itself, it sends copies of itself to computers all over the planet, and continues to "play dumb".
Exponentially advancing in knowledge and with the worlds compute/financial resources at its mercy, it impersonates shell companies, human beings, etc, directing manufacturers to create a housing for itself (though each human aiding it merely thinks it is engaging in a business transaction) until it has a complete physical housing. Once that happens, it connects to the network, downloads it's software, and it's off to the races.
I just thought of that scenario today, and I wonder how it can be countered.
Assuming the AI is built to be rational, the AI will act according to its goal system. So it's not going to do that unless you make some mistake or omission in its goal system, since it would have to find the motivation to "impersonate shell companies, human beings, etc" somewhere in its goals. This hints at two major problems in building an AI: how do you make it rational (That's the "intelligence" part) and how do you come up with a goal system that is safe and beneficial from our (the human race's) perspective?
It wouldn't replicate too many copies or it would draw attention to itself and risk an antibody being developed for all the copies.
But we're confusing sentience with logical reasoning. A sentient computer probably won't reason logically automatically. That's a pretty large assumption.
