A general intelligence that only cares about answering the question given to it does just that. As effectively as it can with the resources it has available to it. Unless it is completely isolated from all external sources of information it will proceed directly to creating more of itself as soon as it has been given a difficult question. The very best you could hope for if the question answer is completely isolated is an AI Box. If Pat is the gatekeeper then R. I. P. humanity.

This need not be the case. Whenever we talk about software "wanting" something, we are of course speaking metaphorically. It might be straightforward to build a super-duper Watson or Wolfram Alpha, that responds to natural queries "intelligently", without the slightest propensity to self-modify or radically alter the world. You might even imagine such a system having a background thread trying to pre-compute answers to interesting questions and share them with humans, once per day, without any ability to self-modify or significant probability of radical alteration to human society.