Theres quite a large number of people who believe it's basically impossible when the intelligence gap is too big

I have a fourth, secret position: we achieved superintelligence the moment we achieved normal intelligence. Speed is a power in and of itself; and even really primitive models like GPT-2 could generate tokens faster than humans could write. They could also be parallelized on hardware that already exists. That is superintelligence in two dimensions - speed and population count. All the arguments the AI safety people are making are about superintelligence in a different dimension - that of "single-context scaling" - but the other dimensions are also relevant to the conversation.

And the superintelligence currently available to us is already causing lots of documented harms. AI psychosis. Sexy suicide coaches. Slop. The problem is that those are all the harms the dirty, filthy AI ethicists talk about. The AI safety people want to talk about new and exciting harms that only the scaling dimension can bring us.

My personal opinion is that if a superintelligence catastrophe actually happens, mitigating those harms will neatly move over from the safety bucket to the ethics bucket, and the safety people will start imagining some new and even worse kinds of harms the next model will make.