If you're the first human on an island full of tigers, you're not going to end up as the Tiger King.
One way to get a cat into a carrier - well, the catfood industry created those funny little dry food pellets that are somehow super-addictive. Shake the box, my cat will come. Drop one in the carrier, it surely will enter. Will it eventually adapt to the trick? Maybe, but not likely if I also do this occasionally without closing the carrier door behind the cat.
Yes, we can outsmart the cat. Cats are funny because they do silly, unpredictable things at random, not because they can't be reliably tricked.
I also think this isn't a very good analogy. In this case we're talking about manipulating humans, where we already know manipulation is eminently possible.
Heck it wouldn't even need psychological manipulation. Hack a Bitcoin exchange or find another way of making money on the internet, then it can just pay someone absurd sums to do what it wants.
A hyper-intelligent AI would be more akin to a baby human - it must be taught and raised first. But like the baby human on the island, it wouldn't be able to be taught by its peers, or benefit from the generations that came before it. It would certainly be at the mercy of the tigers until it matured, and even after it matured we wouldn't expect it to be able to use language or bows, or be anything other than a wild man. It probably wouldn't even seem much more intelligent than the tigers on the island.
We are not the human. We are the tigers. Superintelligent AI is in the position of the human here, and superintelligent AI must ingratiate itself without ever forming an adversarial situation… in this world where backhoes take out fiber backbones and EMPs exist.
AI will probably go native. It'll find things it loves about humans. I'm actually working on a book in this vein… you have to go back to deeper principles, rather than assume 'because AI can be evil, it will be as evil as the evilest individual human, 'cos that's such a winning strategy, right?'.
To become the President, you need only overcome a thousand Florida voters.
To intern the Japanese, you need only overcome two members of SCOTUS (Korematsu v. US)
It isn't necessary for Hawking to be able to trick the average cat into a box. It's sufficient to trick a handful of cats in total.
It's like saying that the way to overcome the population of tigers is to focus on raising and befriending the largest and most cunning tigers, who will then protect you against the rest. Ok, good idea, but unfortunately there is no way to know in advance which little tiger cubs will grow up to be the largest and most cunning.
How well an AI could survive on a desert island is an irrelevant question when Amazon, Google and dozens of others are already running fully (or as near as makes no difference) automated datacentres controlled by a codebase that still has parts written in C. Hawking can easily get the cat in the container: all he has to do is submit a job to taskrabbit.
And Hawking would just ask his assistant to put the cat into the box. You are artificially depriving him of his actual resources to make a weak point.
If I were a tiger, I'd probably think this island sounded like an excellent place for a fun adventure holiday with my tiger friends, and I'd be right to do so. Most likely outcome: good food, some exercise, and we can take some monkey heads home for our tiger cubs to play with.
The same thing with AI, it takes only one, no matter how many dumber ones we entertained ourselves with before.
One adult tiger will kill an unarmed SEAL (and any other human being) in single combat. It would barely exert itself. It would make more sense if, when you said "it only takes one", you were referring to how many tigers could kill five or six SEALs who don't have guns. Fuck it, give your SEAL a fully automatic weapon - the odds are still not in his favor against a single tiger. Large felines have been known to kill or grievously injure humans after taking five high caliber rounds.
This is exactly what idlewords' point is in his essay. Your argument about a SEAL landing on an island of tigers and somehow flipping a weird "Planet of the SEALs" scenario on them is exactly what many (most?) AI alarmists do. These ridiculous debates get in the way of good faith discussion about the real dangerous of AI technology, which is more about rapid automation with less human skin in the game than it is about the subjugation of the human species.
This sort of unrealistic scenario is really fun to talk about, but that's all it is - fun. It's not really productive, and it conveniently appeals to our sense of ego and religious anxiety. Better to do real work and talk about the problems AI will cause in the future.