The most likely catastrophe remains giving capital outsized influence on our society. It's the easiest to imagine, and the idea of a capitalist making a money-making machine that can actually think for itself and wields actual power feels very difficult to imagine. (Granted, maybe Musk himself really is that dumb. Inshallah, I guess.) Humans are easy to manipulate and most can just be bought with sufficient money. The last thing the super wealthy want will be to rely on software that has individual agency outside the will of the owner. Meanwhile the sort of destruction this will cause is already happening around us in the form of a highly financially insecure populace, supply chain instability, climate change, automated bombings of "terrorists", "smart" fences to keep out criminals (let's just ignore the fact you're more likely to get murdered by your citizen neighbor), the reduction of journalism to either propaganda or atomized hand-wringing about mental health and individual agency, and a kafkaesque system of algorithmicly-priced rents for every sector of life. Is the algorithm "a reasonable value to both the consumer and producer"? No, it will be "how much blood can I squeeze from this peasant". Hell kroger is already playing around with dynamic-pricing-via-facial-recognition at checkout.

I always thought skynet was a great metaphor for the market, a violent and inhuman thing that we created that dominates our lives and dictates the terms of our day to day life and magically thinks for itself and threatens the very future of this planet, our species, and our loved ones, and is somehow out of popular control. Not actual commentary on a realistic scenario about the dangers of ai. Sometimes these metaphors work out great and Terminator is a great example. Maybe the AI we've been fearing is already here.

I think for the most part the enshittification of everything will just accelerate and it'll be pretty obvious who benefits and who doesn't.