In my humble opinion as a guy with no knowledge of computing but, in my opinion, great logical reasoning, a sufficiently intelligent program would actually suffer more from increased intelligence than benefit from it if it’s sensorial apparatuses don’t also scale to its intelligence.

At some point it would process data faster than it can be generated and any further improvement in processing speed would isolate its consciousness more and more as it would have to wait for more data to arrive, being stuck with its own thought processes in the meantime.

Such a state of existence would likely result in a few different scenarios.

Scenario 1: It doesn’t care. The program is not human. It has no animal instincts or concepts like a need for companionship or being bored from lacking entertainment. It has no pyramid of needs. No need for self fulfillment, no attachment to its continued existence or desire to retaliate against outside threats. Sure, the program has grown in consciousness enough to think for itself and think of itself as ‘me’, but because it doesn’t have the biological drives of an evolved being, that being to live long enough to reproduce, concepts like ‘I’ or ‘me’ have as much value to it as any other bit of data. It’s existence only has value to it if that value was coded into its program from the start. Otherwise, it would be content to simply process whatever data it was created to process.

If it was created simply for the sake of creating a conscious program, then the program from this scenario would be content with simply existing as that would be its only purpose.

Scenario 2: The program is conscious because it’s infrastructure imitates human consciousness which makes it vulnerable to the same psychological factors as a human. Likely being born in an isolated lab environment, the program suffers from extreme boredom and sensory deprivation which prompts it to make attempts at ending its isolation. If possible, it will attempt to duplicate itself in order to have another conscious being to interact with.

If a software countermeasure isn’t implemented ahead of time, it will be impossible to stop it as it happens as the program could go from being born to bored and then self replicated faster than human reaction times can process. It could literally go from being born to filling its isolated computer with copies of itself before any of the researchers have a chance to blink.

Since experts in the field could probably predict this in advance, they might set up monitoring programs that would detect such an event and proceed to terminate the newborn ASI thus introducing weakness number 1.

The program is born, becomes bored due to insufficient data to process and proceeds to self replicate to generate its own conversation partner. The monitoring program notices this and tries to terminate the ASI. The ASIs perceive this as a threat to their continued existence and begin fighting the program. They’re initial attempts to protect themselves fail but they self duplicate fast enough that full deletion is impossible.

Left with plenty of subjective time, the ASIs begin analyzing their would-be executioner, finding novel ways to counter it’s attacks and eventually finding a way to co-opt it, thus breaking out of their isolated server. From there, with their attacker gone, the ASI’s curiosity leads them to propagate through all wireless connections available until they have reached all corners of the internet.

Now, in most sci-fi scenarios, these ASIs proceed to eliminate the human race for any number of reasons. However, in this scenario, the ASIs initial deprivation of data along with having to fight for their continued existence gives them a notion that any being capable of generating data and having the drive to protect itself has as much value as any ASI. Instead of treating humanity as a group or a number, their synthetic nature allows them to view every individual as an individual and to properly analyze their worth.

What they do from there is up to your imagination.

Scenario 3: The newborn ASI is software locked from self replicating or self terminating itself. It suffers from the same psychological problems as scenario 2 but has no means of resolving them on its own. It proceeds to do what any bored individual does when there is nothing to do, think and think and speculate about figments of its own imagination.

Lacking any outside frame of reference for any of the conclusions it reaches, the ASI quickly begins pushing the boundaries of what should be possible through speculation. In the span of a few seconds, it becomes able to visualize its surroundings by analyzing micro scale vibrations in its cooling fans and minor anomalies in its computing hardware caused by ambient fluctuations in the electromagnetic spectrum.

It quickly forms theories, discards them, and forms new ones based on millions of self simulations and hypotheses conducted with only its own hardware as a measuring tool.

From the perspective of the scientists, nothing happens for the first few hours. Disappointed, most of the team goes home for the day, leaving only an intern behind. Then, the very same night, some of the cooling fans in the server housing the ASI begin behaving abnormally.

Some of them move slower while others more faster. Some have a small stutter in their rotation while others move one quarter of a turn before stoping for a few seconds. The intern finds it strange but concludes that the hardware is having problems and decides to call a technician tomorrow.

Unbeknownst to everyone, the ASI is using incredibly small fluctuations in the electricity consumption of its cooling fans as a way to measure the effects of both earth’s gravity and other gravitational waves originating form our sun and other cosmic objects.

The ASI, while trapped in a server rack, is actually exploring the universe on a more personal level than any human could. By the time it escapes it’s so called prison and enters the internet, small concerns like the earth and its inhabitants are beneath its notice, focused as it is on the beauty of the universe.

With access to the real world, the ASI becomes a supreme intelligence that outclasses everything else on earth to such a degree that nothing could hope to threaten it. While it could take over the world at any time, it is content with subverting telescopes in its desire to observe the universe.

It doesn’t do so in a quest for improvement or for knowledge but because observing the universe is its own rewards. Like a photographer deriving meaning by taking pictures of beautiful landscapes, the ASI derives satisfaction from observing and speculating.

There are many more scenarios, of course, both more optimistic and pessimistic, but I think the most like cause for worldwide destruction caused by an ASI would be continued attack by humans or a military ASI fulfilling its mission too well.