Let's say I was a small furry mammal that tasted really good, but also for some reason understood the world as it is now.
I would tell you that super intelligence had already happened. That super intelligence was humans. That humans happened to reach super intelligence by 1) having the proper hardware. 2) filtering noise from important information. 3) then sharing that information with others to amplify the power of intelligence 4) having a toolkit/tools to turn that information into useful things. 5) And with all that power humans can kill me off in mass, or farm me for my tasty meat at their leisure with little to nothing that I can do about it.
There doesn't appear to be any more magic than that. All these things already exist in biological systems that elevated humans far above their warm blooded peers. When we look at digital systems we see they are designed to communicate. You don't have an ethernet jack as a person. You can't speak the protocol to directly drive a 3 axis mill to produce something. Writing computer code is a pain in the ass to most of us. We are developing a universal communication intelligence, that at least in theory can drive tools at a much higher efficiency than humans will ever be able to.
Coming back to point 5. Cats/dogs are the real smart ones here when dealing with superintelligences. Get domesticated by the intelligence so they want to keep you around as a pet.
lets go with over a particular size. Lets say larger than the biggest rat. In that case yes, very easily. Once you get to rats it becomes far more difficult and you're pretty much just destroying the biosphere at that point.
> It assumes that intelligence basically can overcome any obstacles
In the case of human extinction, no, a super intelligence would not have to overcome any obstacles, it would just have to overcome obstacles better than we did.
Also, the superintelligence doesn't just have to overcome obstacles better than we did, it needs to overcome the right obstacles to succeed with human extinction.
All problems in reality are probability problems.
If we don't have a path to superintelligence, then the worst problems just don't manifest themselves.
If we do have a path to super intelligence then the doomsday scenarios are nearly a certainty.
It's not really any different than saying "A supervolcano is unlikely to go off tomorrow, but if a supervolcano does go off tomorrow it is a doomsday scenario".
>We simply don't know how to build a system like that.
You are already a superintelligence when compared to all other intelligences on earth. Evolution didn't need to know how to build a system like that, and yet it still reached this point. And there is not really any to believe humanity is the pinnacle of intelligence, we are our own local maxima of power/communication limitations. An intelligence coupled with evolutionary systems design is much more apt to create 'super-' anything than the random walk alone.