There's an air of determinism/fatalism about the development of certain technologies that I don't think is true. Technology often is not inevitable. If you asked anyone in the 1970s, we'd all be on Mars right now. Nuclear fission, in many ways the most obvious source of energy (for nuclear-armed states), failed for PR reasons. The development of superintelligence could be stopped for any number of reasons, including the world's powers simply choosing not to build such a technology.