> I think this is the easiest one to knock down. It's very, very attractive to intelligent people who define themselves as intelligent to believe that intelligence is a superpower, and that if you get more of it you eventually turn into Professor Xavier and gain the power to reshape the world with your mind alone.

Also it's not like human intelligence even works that way. IIRC, a lot of extremely intelligent people end up being failures or far less successful than you'd assume given their IQ number.

> The only realistic path to a global AI threat is a subset of the "nuclear war" human to human threat: by taking over (or being given control of) weapon systems.

That may be the only realistic prompt catastrophe like threat, but a realistic longer term one is a withering of human capability and control due to over-delegation that eventually leads to domination. People and societies have been pretty prone to letting that kind of thing get them, if the path there is lined with short-term benefits.