&gt; There are also geniuses who can do amazing feats of mental arithmetic and have no severe mental disabilities in any other areas.<p>And do they seem to hold any sort of significant power? 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>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 <i>terrible</i> problem-solvers when the problems involve other humans.<p>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: 1) that the people promoting the reality of this apocalypse are not as intelligent as they believe themselves to be (a real possibility given their limited understanding of both intelligence and our real achievements in the field of AI) and&#x2F;or that 2) intelligent people are terrible at convincing others, and so don&#x27;t pose much of a risk.<p>Either possiblity shows that super-human AI is a non-issue, certainly not at this point in time. As someone said (I don&#x27;t remember who), we might as well worry about over-population on mars.<p>What&#x27;s worse is that machine learning poses other, much more serious and much more imminent threats than super-human intelligence, such as learned biases, which are just one example of conservative feedback-loops (the more we rely on data and shape our actions accordingly, the more the present dynamics reflected in the data ensure that they don&#x27;t change).