Perhaps the primary barrier between a person’s desire and their ability to do harm to the world is their need to bring other people in on the scheme. These other people have their own moral systems, incentives, preferences, and priorities. But through most of history, to do massive scale harm you had to convince a large number of people to your evil purpose. Technology in general reduces the number of people an individual needs to “get onboard” to affect the world, both for good and evil. Want to dig a big ass hole? The excavator lets one person with enough capital dig as many big ass holes as s/he wants.

AI is the ultimate “exercise your will without having to convince other people of it.” This is both the promise and the risk. So the relevant question is not whether one person of average intelligence is dangerous, it’s whether one person (or a few people) who can enlist the work of millions of average intelligences — without having to convince them of anything — is dangerous.