>Don't you think a truly superior intellect couldn't persuade a large swath of people to help and protect it?

Hell it doesn't even require an SAI to do this.

Even a dumb straightforward algorithm like Bitcoin is enough to ensure a large swath of people dedicate enormous amounts of energy and e-waste doing tremendous amounts of damage to the planet guessing random numbers.

If some random human could come up with Bitcoin, imagine the kind of economic-incentive-perverting-tragedy-of-the-commons attack a super intelligent AI could come up with, to get us to destroy ourselves without lifting a proverbial finger...