Why would intelligence lead to power?

One might say that “Intelligence is no match for a gun, or for someone with lots of money,” but both guns and money were produced by intelligence. If not for our intelligence, humans would still be foraging the savannah for food.

Intelligence is what caused humans to dominate the planet in the blink of an eye on evolutionary timescales. Intelligence is what allows us to eradicate diseases, and what gives us the potential to eradicate ourselves with nuclear war. Intelligence gives us superior strategic skills, superior social skills, superior economic productivity, and the power of invention.

A machine with superintelligence would be able to hack into vulnerable networks via the internet, commandeer those resources for additional computing power, take over mobile machines connected to networks connected to the internet, use them to build additional machines, perform scientific experiments to understand the world better than humans can, invent quantum computing and nanotechnology, manipulate the social world better than we can, and do whatever it can to give itself more power to achieve its goals — all at a speed much faster than humans can respond to.