Fear of superintelligence is just another in series of technological scares, after grey goo and cloning. There may be an explanation why Musk and Thiel indulge in this, they sincerely believe that smart rule (or at least can rule) the world.<p>But nothing is further from the truth. Humans are optimized to be cunning to get positions of power in human society. AI won&#x27;t be optimized in that way, therefore, it&#x27;s probably going to lose for a long time. So evil AI will probably be like incredibly annoying autistic psychopath child, who cannot comprehend human institutions so his evil plans are totally obvious.<p>It&#x27;s like with grey goo - biological systems like bacteria are heavily optimized to survive in very uncertain conditions, and any potential grey goo has to deal with that.<p>I think humanity is currently to blow themselves up via global warming, so superintelligence is not really a comparable threat to humanity. If anything, bigger threat is that we won&#x27;t listen enough to superintelligence. In fact, I think friendly AI will be something like Noam Chomsky - totally rational, right most of the time, fighting for it, telling us what should be done disregarding our emotions. Many people find this annoying, too (including me and many very smart people).<p>Finally, if the hypothesis about superintelligence is right, why would superintelligence want to evolve itself further? It would be potentially beaten by the improved machine, too.