Yeah ML systems often do very surprising "cheats". A while back there was a system for automatically landing aircraft on a carrier deck which exploited an overflow in an acceleration parameter in the simulation--the optimal strategy became to slam as hard as you can into the carrier deck.

But it's a really big leap from that kind of thing to "a large fraction of humanity is manipulated into building the automated factory infrastructure to bring about their demise and turn the entire solar system into paperclips". Or some such thing. There's just a lot of inconvenient reality between where we are now and that fantastic outcome.

So that's why I ask questions like "what are you actually talking about?" when people write stuff like TFA. It's... bizarre. Only makes sense on huge amounts of drugs or to the insane. Or in some hypothetical reality that isn't this one.