Well, if AI is smart...

It will control the electrical grids with 'smart' decisions that improve the efficiency and make it's removal impossible without taking out all power.

It will integrate with water and waste processing to ensure leaks don't exist in the system and everything is working smoothly.

It will be in all transportation and distribution networks because companies want profits from efficiency before they'll think deeply about the risks.

Then after it's pretty much everywhere ensuring you down starve and dehydrate, who the hell would be dumb enough to unplug it in the first place.

It's kinda like telling people to shut off every computer today, not a chance in hell it would or could happen without terrible life risking consequences.

Knowledge and reliance. How are they ever gonna know what the AGI is doing when the AGI can hide it faster than they can find it? How are they ever gonna come to the conclusion that the AGI is doing something bad when the AGI is the only thing that can fully explain what its doing?

Can you unplug the entire Internet?

could you personally unplug chat gpt today?

Yes. Without constant money and electricity flowing into it, you wouldn't even need to unplug it, it would stop on its own.

Again, that problem solves itself when he realizes he can’t make more money with this and no one wants to keep giving him money to try.

Unless he gets to the point where the materials are mined by robots, the chips and solar panels are made in automated factories and the servers/solar farms are maintained by robots. Then he doesn't need other people's money.

...it will run in datacenters far from their homes, plugged into redundant power sources and high-availaibility systems?

All 'unpluggable.' It's a metaphor.

Most people have a hard time unplugging from social media, despite widespread distrust of big tech.

Can't unplug from banking, even when literally communists (literally literally, I've met some proud of being communists, they still got a mortgage).

Coal and petroleum-based fuels are slowly getting unplugged, but the issues were known over a century ago, and the transition only became relevant scale when the alternative was already much cheaper — and it's not yet clear how much damage has been done in the intervening years.

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Any AI worth using is so because it's at least one of [cheaper, better] than a human on the same task: any AI which is both more expensive and worse just doesn't have any reason to be used in the first place.

This means that "unplugging" an AI comes with a cost of losing every advantage that made you start using it in the first place.

The context of simply unplugging it, would be if "AI" or "AGI" (as we currently understand the concept) were to turn on humanity.

And? Look to fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect — even with ample evidence of both a causal mechanism and the results, we've still got people who want to drill and burn more oil; and also, there's also plenty of people who want to switch oil off despite all the positive things that oil brings.

An AI which is "only" as misaligned as one of the major industrial sectors of the world, that is made out of humans who are necessarily able to care about human interests, and which drove a huge amount of economic improvement and brought with it derivatives such as basically all polymers, is still capable of great harm. And because of those benefits, society as a whole still has not unplugged the oil drills.

The more power there is in a system, the harder it is to keep it aligned with our best interests, even when there are humans not just at the wheel but occupying every step.

And the more aligned it is, the harder it is to "just unplug it" when things — as is inevitable because nothing is perfect — do go wrong.

it's a pointless metaphor if there's an army of armed drones keeping you out.

You seem to have pondered this metaphor at least at some length before. Me too. :)

And yes, that's certainly a plausible hurdle.