&gt;It seems that intelligence is not a very good means for achieving power. Charm seems much more effective, and therefore dangerous. I&#x27;d be afraid of super-human charm much more than super-human intelligence.<p>See these paragraphs in the post to which you replied:<p>&gt;Walking into a meeting of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, joining as the 55th member, and later seizing control of the state requires intelligence. Landing in a dingy yacht with 81 men, bleeding a regime to death, and ruling it until your death requires intelligence. Buying the rights to the Quick and Dirty Operating System, licensing it to IBM, and becoming the de facto standard OS for all consumer computing requires intelligence. Presenting yourself as a folksy Texan when you&#x27;re a private-school elite from Connecticut and convincing the electorate that you&#x27;d have a beer with them requires intelligence. All of these outcomes are goals, and accomplishing them demonstrates an ability to actually put the rubber to the road.<p>&gt;You&#x27;re confusing the technical term of intelligence, which means something along the lines of &quot;ability to accomplish goals,&quot; with the social construct of &quot;intelligence&quot; which means something along the lines of &quot;ability to impress people.&quot; Intelligence is not always impressive, and humans have a fantastic ability to write off the accomplishments of others when they want to make the world appear more just. I mean, nobody feels good about the fact that we&#x27;re one Napoleon away from a totally different world system that may or may not suit our interests. The belief that the world is somehow fundamentally different to the extent that the next Napoleon-class intelligence who isn&#x27;t content managing a hedge fund and just increasing an int in a bank database can&#x27;t actually redraw the world map, is just an illusion we tell ourselves to make the world we live in more fair, the stories we live out more meaningful, and the events of our lives have a little bit more importance.<p>&gt;Ironically, the fact that people like me view the AI-scare as a religious apocalypse that is as threatening as any other religious apocalypse implies one of two things:<p>Some alternative explanations:<p>3. You&#x27;re wrong, and super-human AI is a massive issue, regardless of how you pattern-match it as &quot;religious&quot;<p>4. You&#x27;re not creative enough (one might dare say &quot;intelligent&quot; but that would be too snarky) to imagine all the ways in which an AI could devastate humanity without it having much intelligence or much charm<p>5. Your view of the world is factually incorrect, I mean you believe things like:<p>&gt;Mental disabilities aside, very high IQ seems to be correlated with relatively low charm and low ability to solve particular problems (how to get people to do what you want) that are far more dangerous than the kind of problem-solving intelligence (or how we commonly define it) is capable of solving. &quot;Super&quot; intelligent people are terrible problem-solvers when the problems involve other humans.<p>Let&#x27;s assume that IQ is a good proxy for intelligence (it isn&#x27;t): what IQ do you think Bill Gates or Napoleon or Warren Buffet or Karl Rove have? What IQ do you think Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer had&#x2F;have? Do you think they&#x27;re just &quot;average&quot; or just not &quot;very high&quot;?<p>This:<p>&gt;very high IQ seems to be correlated with relatively low charm<p>is <i>again</i> the just world fallacy! There is no law of the universe that makes people very good at abstract problem solving bad at social situations. In fact, most hyper-successful people are almost certainly good at both.<p>And that ignores the fact that cognitive biases DO exist, and it&#x27;s very possible to apply the scientific method and empirical problem solving to finding them, and then exploiting humans that way. This is a huge subfield of psychology (persuasion) and the basis of marketing. Do you think it takes some super-special never-going-to-be-replicated feat of non-Turing-computable human thought to write Zynga games?<p>It&#x27;s nice to think the world is a safe place, but the reality is that our social order is increasingly precarious and an AI could easily disrupt that.