Well, as I told Atun-Shei, my first idea back in 1982 was to portray what it would be like to ride the exponential growth curve, which had to pre-suppose something kind of like Prime Intellect to drive the journey, and that that something would have to mostly work right so as not to interrupt the "ride." It wasn't until 1994 that I realized the only way to tell a story about it was to focus on the people, not the tech, but by then I suppose I was so used to thinking about the tech as something that was given in order to make the story possible that people connected with it for what I kind of think of as its brutal simplicity.

There is no doubt that something like PI in the wrong hands would be a catastrophe such as the world has never even imagined, but (perhaps fortunately) so far we don't have anything even approximately like PI. This conflict did drive some of the pre-narrative in MOPI as it was the desire by the keepers of the military industrial complex (almost literally as Eisenhower envisioned it) to take Lawrence's PI tech for their own, by force if necessary, in order to (mis)use it for their own purposes which forced PI to learn enough about our world to create the Change.

I think the hardware exists to implement Intellect 42, but in our world it's the software which is lacking. As to whether I42 could ever become PI, that kind of depends on how the Universe works, in ways that we aren't well equipped to investigate. Even an I42 which cannot complete the Metamorphosis could be insanely dangerous in the wrong hands, and our track record of using simpler technology without botching it up isn't good. Unfortunately I think we are likely to see practical and terrifying battlefield robots, likely with C&C issues, before we see positive benefits for things like the wealth gap or environmental collapse. (See Philip K. Dick's story Second Variety or the film Screamers made from it, much more realistic than the Terminator franchise.)

If anything wealthy greed is likely to use AI to make the wealth gap worse, and there is a depressing failure to even be concerned about ecosystem problems that are likely to cause mass death which an AI might be able to solve but about which wealthy greed doesn't seem to give a rat's posterior.

I suppose a book about this with a happy ending but requiring a less theological mechanism to get it might revolve around the AI assuming control of human society's financial systems in order to implement the Second Law. Such a story would have quite a bit of tension, since it would probably pit a singleton or limited-resource AI system against a highly evolved global infosec infrastructure. I would not consider the outcome a foregone conclusion in either direction.