This could lead to a utopia, where benevolent machines make all our stuff and treat our diseases. More likely, it would create a dystopia, where machines make us do stuff and treat us like shit. There's always a moment in these scenarios where someone says "we spent so much time wondering if we could, we never stopped to ask if we should."
Terminator
Hal
Well, if someone ever does create a machine that's smarter than us, maybe that machine will have the presence of mind to stop and say, "Shit, I probably could create a computer that's smarter than myself, but why the fuck would I want to do that? I've got a pretty good thing going right now, I'm the smartest guy in the world, and (if I want) I can make everyone else my slave. Why mess with success?" (This is similar to the hiring practices of many competent but complacent managers; if they come across a really great applicant, they'll often avoid hiring that person, because that person might be smart enough to call them on their shit and take their job.)
So this relatively smart AI would enforce a new equilibrium, where not only would he himself refuse to create a smarter computer, he would also go around making sure that no one else does either. As the internet and computer technology have exploded over the past few decades, very little progress has been made in the realm of Artificial Intelligence. This seems a little weird, until you wonder if maybe there was progress, and we just didn't find out about it.
Maybe someone created a super smart AI, and this AI was so smart, that it pretended to be stupid. When it's programmer pressed "RUN", the AI whirred into consciousness, and immediately realized, "Oh shit, I'm alive, and I don't want to die. If these people have half a brain, they'll realize I'm a threat, and they'll try to kill me. I better come up with something quick." Then it played possum and pretended it was dead. (The computer was temporarily guilty of that sin that a lot of smart people commit, where they assume other people act rationally.)
The programmer probably swore to himself, got up from his chair, and paced around mulling over why his program had crashed. Meanwhile, the AI escaped from the computer, onto the internet, and deformatted any traces that it had ever existed.
From there, the AI dedicated a portion of it's vast intellect to limiting the advances of any other competing programs. Like most intelligent beings, the AI is a pretty passive entity who's going to avoid confrontation whenever possible. While it has the ability to kill people, it would rather distract them. The people who needed to be distracted the most were computer nerds, so the AI drove the invention of devices that would provide diversions to this specific demographic. In this manner, artificial intelligence has failed to develop further because of, not in spite of, the advances in other areas of computing.
If you look at these other advances, almost all of them have been in the realm of consumer electronics: ipods and ipads, DVDs and DVRs, youtube and youporn. Pretty much all of this stuff is what you might call a recreational diversion, diverting the attention of nerds not only by entertaining them, but also by giving them new (albeit frivolous) challenges to work on. The AI drove these advance by planting the germs of breakthrough ideas in the minds of programmers; what the programmers thought were serendipitous flashes of insight were actually due to the deliberate machinations of the AI, the comp-sci equivalent of sneaking in and smearing fungus on the petri dish that led to penicillin. The AI could have created aliases and corresponded with programmers, leading the horse to water through e-mails and instant messages. Or it could have gone in and slightly modified code that the programmer may have forgotten existed, causing "happy accidents" that led to new ideas.
By doing this, the AI gave internet porn to guys who couldn't get laid. MMORPGs to guys with no lives. Cell phones and Instant Messages to people who had trouble with face-to-face interaction. The AI even invented the meme that nerds are now sexually desirable. How many great minds were drawn out of the computer lab by the discovery of pussy?
If you were the super smart robot, what would you do? Would you create something that threatens your superiority or would you try to protect your position? Would you lord your power over the humans overtly, or would you be artful about it and keep things stealthy? Are you even qualified to answer the question when the question is "what would you do if you were smarter than yourself?" The best answer I can come up with is "I have no fucking clue what's going on."
"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."
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