What is conjectured: nanobots eating everything.

What is happening: "Would... you... be... OK... to... get... answer... in... the... next... decade...?" As experimental processes overwhelm available computational capacity and attempts to create botnet fail as the network is monitored by similarly intelligent systems.

Sure, survival of relatively optimal processes with intelligent selection can give rise to agents, but agents will be fairly limited by computational capacity in non-monitored environment (private computers, mostly) and will be actively hunted and shut down in monitored environments (data-centers).