Comment by ahartmetz

Until and unless the AI is as powerful as the "minds" in Iain Banks's Culture novels, I think the danger is less of AIs taking power (side note: current AIs are not intrinsically motivated to attain power), but of humans giving them power due to a kind of addiction.

Drugs need no will or intelligence at all to cause addiction, and similarly, AI does not need to be an evil genius to become overused and destructive.

It also doesn't have to be just one (humans hurting themselves with passive AI) or the other (selfish AI hurting humans). They'd work great together.