It almost feels like we are seeing the digital analogue of the evolution of the flighted stinging insect, i.e. mosquitoes, bees, etc. They don't have to be very smart individually to absolutely decimate the population of megafauna. A tiny bit of economic intelligence goes a really long way here.
AI just makes using existing script kiddie stuff easier.
> "…Social engineering…"
I know Mitnick is synonymous with social engineering. This article in another post is right on the money with the kind of cyber attacks I had in mind, however: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605553