>So it's super smart and has its own goals. We can reliably presume that it will need energy to achieve those goals. Will it need to achieve them quickly? Why? Would the superintelligence be shortsighted enough to provoke humans into active combat against it?
It happened so many times throughout human history, that it's really foolish to reject. People with their own goals burned, raped, murdered. Maybe superintelligence will build its own civilization, and to suppress remorse will put people in reservations.
You'd think a "super" intelligence would be smart enough to minimize the waste of resources to fight anyone or anything. You'd think it would find the most harmonious path to dominance, as it would be the most efficient.
If you wanted to quell a rabble of contrary people, you could, say, control and direct all the education available to the population, make sure that reality-escaping drugs were easily obtainable, provide loads of free entertainment that ran 24x7, make sure that prices of luxury goods (like game consoles or fashionable clothes or whatever) were affordable for the majority of the population, allow people to feel important by giving them access to make comments on various sites on the internet, manipulate all the world's news with the feedback of what was happening on social media...
Wait, we were talking about some mythical future, right?
>People with their own goals burned, raped, murdered.
Yes, they did those things to people. Because _they_ were people. Because people share the same needs for the same resources, and operate the same. That's all out the window for a machine-based superintelligence. Such an entity would not need our land, our food, our homes, our orifices, etc. I have no doubt it would have the ability to wipe us out. But I have never heard a cogent reason behind why it would need to. Especially considering that we would at least try to put up a fight and, if it were truly hopeless, likely do whatever would be the equivalent of 'salting the earth' before we were eliminated.
It happened so many times throughout human history, that it's really foolish to reject. People with their own goals burned, raped, murdered. Maybe superintelligence will build its own civilization, and to suppress remorse will put people in reservations.