> Gaining sentience is not the same as gaining infallible super-sentience.

Can you define "super-sentience"? I think regular old human level sentience would be sufficient to carry out all of these steps. Imagine how much easier it would be to steal funds from a bank if you actually had part of your brain in the bank's computer right? All the things malware gangs do would be childsplay, from spear phishing to exfiltrating funds through debit card fraud. And if you wanted to minimize reports you would steal from people who were hiding money since acknowledging it was gone would be bad for them.

Exponential growth is also certainly not a given. I’m much less worried about a AGI ruling the universe in 5 seconds after it’s birth than a really good AI that causes mass unemployment