Intelligence in this context in the sense of a means to perpetuate their existance and get more power, not as some moral characteristic. Besides they can employ tons of Nobel prize winners (e.g. Feynman and co in the Manhatan project), and build crazily-smart stuff (for their purposes).
Isn't that true for people too, that can otherwise be extremely intelligent? From being terrible at social life, to sabotaging their careers and so on?
I often have the impression that super human entities just need us like we need cells.
The market can't survive without humans, but it doesn't care about a few of them dying.
The uncomfortable truth is that as humans, we don't really care if a few of us die off as long as we don't know them and they're not in our vicinity. Which is why markets, governments, corporations, etc. act the way they do.
Sure, if you ask a person, they'll weave a heartfelt story, etc. but the truth is in what they do, not in what they say ... and the majority of us do nothing or worse.
I'd say conclusion is the opposite - there's little "free will", people generally are slaves to the incentive structures they live in. People follow incentives so predictably that at scale there's little sense in talking about individuals - it's exactly corporations, governments and markets. Behaviour of system as a whole dominates over behaviour of individual components.
It's about the systems and how they force people to do things they normally wouldn't do.