And who is to say that trigger hasn’t long been pulled? How do we know the agents haven’t found a way yet to modify their own code base similar to how Stuxnet manipulated the Iranian centrifuges and their control systems, stealthily recording data across generations?

To kill someone with a gun a person has to pull the trigger with the clear intent to kill.

The concern with AI, and the purpose of the OG paperclip maximizer thought experiment, is that the outcome could be extremely divergent from the intent of the original person pulling the trigger / sending the prompt.

Still more likely that a person types "kill all people" (or something tangential where this is the logical conclusion).

What if there are already (possibly hidden) loops somewhere, maybe even ultra-slow ones at the inter-generation level? What if some AIs could do that not with so explicit and dramatic actions, but much more subtly, through undetected manipulation at a vast scale level? What if (when) they reached ASI and through billions of micro-decisions manipulated people to do apparently minor choices that appeared innocent in isolation but whose collective outcomes lead to an earlier extinction of the human being (if at some point was determined to be an obstacle)? How could we (as a species) not be outsmarted by an ASI?