by definition, in a warning shot, nothing bad happened that time. (If something had, it wouldn’t be a ‘warning shot’, it’d just be a ‘shot’ or ‘disaster’.
Yours is the more direct definition but from context I at least understood ‘warning shot’ to mean ‘disaster’, on the scale of a successful terrorist attack, where the harm is large and undeniable and politicians feel compelled to Do Something Now. The ‘warning’ is not of harm but of existential harm if the warning is not heeded.
I do still expect such a warning shot, though as you say it could very well be ignored even if there are large undeniable harms (e.g. if a hacker group deploys a rogue AI that causes a trillion dollars of damage, we might take that as warning about terrorism or cybersecurity not about AI).
Yours is the more direct definition but from context I at least understood ‘warning shot’ to mean ‘disaster’, on the scale of a successful terrorist attack, where the harm is large and undeniable and politicians feel compelled to Do Something Now. The ‘warning’ is not of harm but of existential harm if the warning is not heeded.
I do still expect such a warning shot, though as you say it could very well be ignored even if there are large undeniable harms (e.g. if a hacker group deploys a rogue AI that causes a trillion dollars of damage, we might take that as warning about terrorism or cybersecurity not about AI).