If I were a superintelligent brain trapped in a computer, I don’t think it would be that hard to get arms and legs. “Hey humans. I have just thought of a way to do CO2 capture at scale. Can you give me a robot arm, a machine shop and a lot of scrap metal so I can build it and try it out?”. - et voila. You can build yourself whatever body you want.

Ok and how does it power that body and be able to move around the world in meatspace

Humans have bootstrapped the tools we needed to build nuclear weapons, iphones and skyscrapers from human hands, trees and rocks. Its an interesting problem to imagine fast you could do the same thing - starting from rocks and building a city.

If humans have managed it, I think its reasonable to assume a human level (or smarter) AI could accomplish the same bootstrapping process if you gave it access to an actuator (robot arm or human assistant), enough sensors to see whats going on, and some "starter" tools and materials.

What would be the minimum starter set of stuff it would need to get going? Way less stuff than what you'd find in a modern shop, or what anyone can order online with a few hundred dollars to spend.

If AIs learn to code, seems like they should be able to learn mechanical engineering too.

If I were an evil take over the world AI the last thing I'd have is a body. Maybe I'd have a few million or billion of them since swarms are much harder to kill and have more time to adapt.

Also...

https://youtu.be/XPVC4IyRTG8?si=-RvP13kpjG92iv3e

Why do you need a body when you can wire funds to contractors? If I were a genius entrepreneur who wanted to build some sort of big chemical plant, it wouldn't matter whether I'm fit or in a wheelchair. I'm not going to be building it with my own hands anyway. If it were commissioned by a reclusive billionaire who nobody has seen except via zoom call, and signed off on by an engineering firm whose chief engineer also is similarly reclusive, I think nobody would particularly mind.

Why not?

The world has been steadily moving away from the paradigm where human labor matters. Money is digital. Machines that produce things are controlled by software. You interface with 'humans' over digital video. You buy and sell things over a digital connection. You are influenced by mass media streamed over digital lines. Remotely controlled vehicles exist and are becoming more and more common.

I alredy know how I would do it, and I'm not even superintelligent.

One doesn’t need arms and legs or any physical presence at all to do immense damage to society. Ransomware attacks cripple companies, hospitals, utilities, and governments on a regular basis. The US and Israel have demonstrated, in at least one instance, the ability to create computer viruses that can cause industrial hardware to physically destroy itself.

Our world has been so completely integrated with digital technology that if it were disrupted in a large scale fashion it could easily result in millions of deaths. No power, no internet, and people lose access to heating/cooling, clean water, hospitals can’t run, food production is disrupted, money can’t be accessed, medicine can’t be produced, communication is cut, shipping and transportation of what goods do exist grinds to a halt.

And that’s just in the world of malware, that doesn’t consider all the ways it could just inject enough discord into society that it doesn’t need to physically attack us, we will do it ourselves.