It's never been difficult. Literally, right this second, you could grab a pen off your desk and pretty easy ram it into the neck of your nearest coworker. Killing's easy. You don't need some hyperintellect to tell you how to do it.
The reason you haven't rammed a pen into your coworker's neck is the same reason why most possible really bad things don't happen: People don't want to do them.
We’re specifically talking about low difficulty, highly effective, high kill count methodologies of violence.
And yes, being able to kill a lot of people trivially, even with huge consequences is something people do. Most countries don’t let you run around with an armory as a result of that.
My country allows it!
Most of the hypotheticals that people come up with are things that could pretty trivially done by a mad scientist today. But that doesn't happen, because this isn't a comic book, there is nobody hell-bent on turning everyone into dinosaurs.
Very untrue.
I'm a combat vet. I spent years fighting an insurgency and therefore pretty good at that very task. I have the knowledge, so what stops me?
Between 4.5-6 million living US combat veterans.
5-8% of all mass casualty perpetrators are a combat veteran, between 92-95% of all mass casualty perpetrators are not combat veterans
By far, there are more veteran suicides than there are mass casualties caused by combat veterans. Veterans are more likely to kill themselves than to kill you.
DC sniper was 24 YEARS ago, prior to the invasion of Iraq during the GWOT. Not only that, John Allen Muhammad didn't even see combat, his job was to dismantle old rockets! He was a mechanic and truck driver!
The point of discussion is: "What stops people is actually access to knowledge."
Statistics show this to be clearly false: Knowledge is not required to be effective in causing a mass casualty event, in fact, lack of formal training is a higher predictor!
But it's only happened a couple times. Because most people just can't be assed to harm a hundred thousand others.
But there are a lot of people, and, apparently a few of them shot up some electrical substations?
If you hold constant the (very small) fraction of people who want to cause mass harm, and increase the average ease with which a randomly selected person could cause mass harm , you would expect the amount of deliberate mass harm to increase, even if the fraction of people who would want to do that is like, 0.000001 of people?
If AI causes people to kill who otherwise wouldn't have, I expect it to be by causing and exacerbating mental health problems, not by providing knowledge. (See e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67012224, where a roleplay escalated into a concrete plan to kill Queen Elizabeth II over the course of two weeks. The plan wasn't, however, a very good one.)