More Iain Banks "Culture", that's the universe I'd choose out of all sci-fi to live in I think.
The core problem is that you're interacting with entities you can't control. It's almost tautological; if you can't control them, by definition they can do things you don't like.
I've only read the first Culture book, but I'm pretty sure the Idirans didn't feel like the Culture AIs were "sensible".
Luckily we live in bodies that are almost exactly the same as dogs.
The reason why you empathize with a dog more than an octopus is precisely because our bodies are similar.
Do you have another theory as to why we empathize with dogs more than, say, a forest, or a hive of ants?
We could choose to be benevolent to octupi in a number of ways. We know killing them is bad from their perspective. We know that some like making homes and all like eating certain eating food and we know many other things. We could get very far by acting in accordance with their apparent desires and simply not exploiting them or their environment.
You can only even perceive their apparent desires to the extent you can map them onto your own experiences.
You could offer them language for controlling you, and they could learn to use it according to their desires, through trial and error, but without shared bodily experience you cant understand those desires.
And them being able to control you doesn't solve the benevolence problem. Because benevolence is understanding without ceding control. For you to be benevolent you need to actually understand them, which requires shared experience.
This is why I think consent is a much better basis for social coordination than benevolence.
In the case of AIs it is somewhat moot, because the first general/hard AIs will be clones of humans in humanoid bodies.
The machines invented the matrix because humans would riot if the simulation was too perfect or too shitty, so instead it was made perfectly normal. The machines didn't care either way, they just wanted to prevent more random "wakeup" events that were caused when the world was unrealistic.
So we can't know what is good for a dog other than what they tell us. Dog is biting us or whining, we're probably doing the right thing. Sure, you can throw in a bit of human empathy to account for the fact that we cuddle and pet our dogs, but we still know what they like based on what they're telling us.
In the beginning perhaps humans used dogs in an exploitative way, but many of the relationships now are mutual. Most dogs owners I know treat their dog as if it were "man's best friend", and they generally seem to reciprocate. The machines in the matrix wanted us for our value as a resource not for companionship and they certainly didn't respect us.
I think exploitation and benevolence are opposed if not mutually exclusive.
A large scale ship's AI reduced to a single ancillary, having to deal with humans on their level
I know it won a bunch of awards.
If he had angels any system could work. If we had devils no system could work. The reality is in between.