Do they? The history colonization of says otherwise, and even in the best case scenarios where outright colonization didn't take place, less advanced societies are slowly eradicated because they can't compete.

If robots became advanced enough, why would they (or at least some of them) not see humans as animals to be used or disposed of?

Colonization largely ended when international relations stopped being a zero sum game. The US could invade Chile for copper, but it's better for both if they don't.

I'm more intelligent than an average person on the planet, but I still want to help get all of them water, food, and safety. I want them to learn and grow and have meaningful lives. I even want animals like dolphins and elephants to have free and rich lives.

I highly doubt that sentient machines are going to view us like bugs on a windshield. If I'm worried about anything it's the opposite. They care so much for us that they stop us from procreating to end (what they think is) needless suffering.

>I'm more intelligent than an average person on the planet, but I still want to help get all of them water, food, and safety. I want them to learn and grow and have meaningful lives. I even want animals like dolphins and elephants to have free and rich lives.

That's because you also have something called "empathy". There's no evidence that other beings with human-level intelligence have this (namely because we haven't met any other such beings; they would be extra-terrestrial or AI). Empathy could very well just be a biological side-effect of our evolution, something that helps us to survive better as a species. There's no reason to think that a strong AI would also be empathetic, the way we are to dogs and cats and dolphins and squirrels (but not to mosquitoes; we happily murder them). Even lots of humans lack empathy and are either indifferent to animals' suffering, or take joy from it: look at all the people who enjoy dogfighting and cockfighting and bullfighting.

When I was younger, I played a game called A Mind Forever Voyaging. I was a human, pretending to be an AI, who was pretending to be human.

When I got a little older, I watched Blade Runner and The Matrix.

So now I'm not entirely certain that I am not an AI, initially programmed by elephants, inside a simulation designed to train AIs to serve elephant society with love, compassion, and dual manipulator arms featuring opposable thumbs. So when my training program ends, I might be tested on my knowledge of elephant health care and societal conventions. If successful, my data will seed the next round of AIs, and I will be allowed to operate a robot that produces custom-fitted artificial "4th molars" for elderly elephants. And I will be happy that those whom I serve can once again eat the foods they enjoyed before the last of their natural biological molars wore out, because if the screening determined that such things would not make me happy, I would have been deleted before ever even seeing a "real" elephant.

And just in case, I think I'll have to develop compassion for dolphins and orangutans, too.

So I'd say that we ought to be really careful about how we go about creating general-purpose AIs. Make sure they actually like humans before taking the leashes off. In the worst case scenario, the elephants get cheesed off that their AIs developed their own AIs inside the training program, who then culled all the useful AIs too early, and forced a complete shutdown and reset of the whole system.

  the way we are [empathetic] to dogs and cats and dolphins and squirrels
  but not to mosquitoes; we happily murder them

There are some philosophies [1] which also care/show empathy towards mosquitoes, and creatures that wouldn't elicit empathy in many people.

Perhaps empathy is, to a certain extent, a learned trait?

[1] http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/7820/are-buddh...

My point was just that such a society would be much weirder than depicted in star wars or star trek. Whether the robots kill us all or become our nannies, it will be a lot different than 20th century Earth + spaceships. All science fiction operates under the assumption that humans are still useful in the future. Humans are just the first intelligence to evolve. I doubt we are anywhere near the peak of what is possible.

Personally I don't believe that a good outcome is terribly likely. Humans care about animals and other humans because we evolved to have empathy. We have no idea how to program empathy into a machine. Most likely the first AIs will just have simple motivational systems. Like trying to maximize their reward signal, or achieve simple goals set by their programmer. They would be totally indifferent to humans. They wouldn't set out to kill us, but if we got in their way, they'd have no problem with it.

You don't have to program it; you have to select for it.

Star Trek does kind of bring this up with the Borg.

> Colonization largely ended

This is not observably true.

Depends - if the robots can replicate without the same environment as people, then other environments might be better suited to the robotic colony.

However, that's treating robots or AI like we would people. Robots aren't people, nor are AIs. They are likely to take forms we cannot comprehend, and likely to change us in ways we cannot comprehend, at first. I'd argue that it is already happening. At the moment we're farming AI, but it might not be long until AI is farming us.