Bees might be a better analogy since they produce something that humans can use.
...for now. Given sufficient advances in robotics, why would you expect that to continue?
And yet they're endangered, and we already figured out how to do pollination, so we know we can survive without them - it's just going to be a huge pain. Some famines may follow, but likely not enough to endanger civilization as a whole.
Thus even with this analogy, if humans end up being an annoying supply chain dependency to an AI, the AI might eventually work out an alternative supply chain, at which point we're back to being just an annoyance.
I'm not confident enough to rely on that: most people in the west have never encountered a famine, only much milder things like the price of one or two staples being high — eggs currently — never all of them at once.
What will we do to ourselves if we face a famine? Will we go to war (or exterminate the local "undesirables") like the old days?
How fragile are we now, compared to the last time that happened? How much has specialisation meant that the elimination of certain minorities will just break everything? "Furries run the internet", as the memes say. What other sectors are over-represented by a small minority?
The value of atoms - or even the value of raw materials made of atoms is hopefully less than the value of information embodied in complex living things that have processed information from the ecosystem over millions of years via natural selection. Contingent complexity has inherent value.
I think there's a claim to be made that AI is just as likely to value us (and complex life in general) as it is to see as a handy blob of hydrocarbons. This claim is at least as plausible as the original claim.
It's all fun and games until two people or groups contest the same limited resources; then there's sword and fire o'clock.
Most nations on earth are not at war with each other.
My observation is that most people are pretty nice, and the assholes are rare outliers. I don't think we would survive as a species if it was the other way 'round.
My nation of birth famously took over a quarter of the planet.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move… but only by the people who actually kicked my forebears out — even my parents (1939/1943) who saw the winds of change and end of empire, were convinced The Empire had done the world a favour.
> My observation is that most people are pretty nice, and the assholes are rare outliers. I don't think we would survive as a species if it was the other way 'round.
In-group/out-group. We domesticated ourselves, and I agree we would not have become so dominant a species if we had not. But I have heard it said that psychopaths are to everyone what normal people are to the out-group. That's the kind of thing that allowed the 9/11 attackers to do what they did, or the people of the US military to respond the way they did. It's how the invasion of Vietnam happened, it's how the Irish Potato Famine happened despite Ireland exporting food at the time, it's the slave owners who quoted the bible to justify what they did, and it's the people who want to outlaw (at least) one of your previous employers.
Conflict doesn't always mean "war".
Why would it invest resources to relocate and protect itself when it could mitigate the threat directly? Or, why wouldn't it do both, by using our resources to relocate itself?
In the famous words of 'Eliezer, that best sum up the "orthogonality thesis": The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.
> ants could technically conspire to sneak up to you while you sleep and bite you all at once to kill you, so do you go out to eradicate all ants?
Ants are always a great case study.
No, of course not. But if, one morning, you'll find ants in your kitchen, walking over your food, I don't imagine you'll gently collect them all and release in the nearby park. Most people would just stomp them out and call it a day. And, should the ants set up an anthill in your backyard and mount regular invasions of your kitchen, I imagine you'd eventually get pissed of and destroy the anthill.
And I'm not talking about some monstrous fire ants like the ones that chew up electronics in the US, or some worse hell-spawn from Australia that might actually kill you. Just the regular tiny black ants.
Moreover, people don't give a second thought to anthills when they're developing land. It stands where the road will go? It gets paved over. It sticks out where children will play? It gets removed.