alt Hacker News> Yes, proper intellect generates ethics ("an" ethical stance, output of the preceding intellectual effort). It requires that adequate level of ability and effort and reflection though to reach specific ethical milestones and adherence.
If this was true, why are the history books littered with so many evil people who gained power?
This isn't a rhetorical question, by the way: If you can prove that being smart actually does necessarily come with ethics despite that observation, that solves a whole category of doom scenarios.
(Not all doom scenarios, because we still have the "what if AI is only a smart as those specific evil people" or heck, "what if AI is only as smart as cancer, killing its host" scenarios; but it helps a lot for the foom-then-doom cases).
> why are the history books littered with so many evil people who gained power
That they gained power or not is as-if irrelevant: the amount of intelligence that grants successful agency is not above the threshold of ethics - on the contrary, a psychotic agent reaches goals with less constraints.
If they were evil under some judgement of level l, they simply did not reach that judgement. It's what I was saying in the original post. They were not intelligent enough - either in the general ability, or in the specific deliberation.