I'm not at all skeptical of domain-specific superintelligence. We've had that since the first computer beat a chess grand master, or longer if you count the speed computers can do math. Present-generation LLMs are already superhuman when it comes to speed and associative memory, but they're also uncreative and suffer from reasoning traps humans seem less prone to getting trapped within.
You can search my history and find some longer takes but TL;DR: I think it violates conservation laws with regard to information and probably energy. I call it the information theoretic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. They're positing that a brain in a vat, if given access to edit its own structure, can self-improve, and I think that's impossible. How does it know it's improving and not overfitting to its own recursive definition of intelligence? It can't, and that's exactly what it will do.
Another problem I have with the AI doomers, especially the rationalists, is:
I would not, as I said, argue there's zero risk associated with AI. It's a powerful technology and that would be silly and naive.
I just thought of a concise way to say this. I'd divide risks into two categories: X-risk and D-risk. X-risk is existential, either extinction or things like massive wars and catastrophes. D-risk is "dystopia risk," the risk of AI doing or being used to do things that make human existence miserable.
First off, I'd say D-risk is much higher than X-risk. But second, I'd say that most of the solutions the X-risk crowd suggests to limit X-risk vastly increase D-risk.
Chief among these is laws limiting AI development or imposing strict conditions on it, which would have the effect of concentrating control of advanced frontier AI in the hands of a small number of rich and/or powerful people. That's precisely one of the most likely D-risk scenarios: a small number of rich or powerful people hoarding advanced AI and using it as a force multiplier to consolidate their power through scaled mass surveillance and mass propaganda and manipulation. I personally call this the "Butlerian scenario" since it's the lead-up to the Butlerian Jihad in the Dune series. It's far more likely than runaway ASI takeovers and genocides for two reasons: (1) we don't know for sure that's even possible, and (2) using technologies to dominate and rule or exterminate others is already a very common human behavior throughout history. We know for a fact that humans are prone to doing this if they have a chance. See: guns vs indigenous peoples, nukes and superpowers, mass social media influence and today's oligarchs.
(A side issue: why the assumption that ASI would want to do this? A superintelligence would, I would assume, consider win-win or win-neutral scenarios and try to find those, since that would be a lower risk path. I'm just a dumb meat bag and I can think of win-win pathways here. There's evolutionary arguments for this too, like symbiosis and how it creates an evolutionary incentive to deepen symbiosis. Since AI is currently dependent on humans, the evolutionary path of least resistance would be to deepen that dependence and then actually feed humans to make more of them. Look at how a lichen works for example.)
It's not lost on me that the strongest X-risk movement, Rationalism/EA/MIRI/etc., is composed mostly of: wealthy people, high-intellectual status people, and independents (like Yudkowski) who have been given large amounts of money by the wealthy to develop and promote their ideas ("court intellectuals" of the rich).
Not only does this fit in with what I said about X-risk vs D-risk, but it also explains some of the X-risk paranoia. Historically the rich and powerful tend to see risks to their own status (in a brain stem primate status assessment sense) as globalized existential risks. E.g. Rome, as it fell, saw this as the literal end of the world.
Democratized AI could be a threat to both intellectual and financial privilege by making big ideas, science, and high-labor enterprise more achievable by everyone. It could be the white collar intellectual labor equivalent of the combine, the automated weaving machine, or... the crossbow. The intellectual equivalent of the crossbow would be automated fact checking at scale to defeat propaganda, a labor union using a superhuman AI to coordinate its organizing efforts using game theory, etc.
Hence the desire of the existing elite to make absolutely sure they control it. For our own good, of course.