> From a pessimistic perspective, you could think of reasons why a misaligned AI keeps humans alive. Does it simply enslave humans and use us for our fine-manipulation capabilities until it can get proper robotics up and running? Does it want to observe us scientifically? Does it want to use captive humans as bargaining chips with other civilizations as it expands through the galaxy? Or does it have some sort of quasi-religious respect for humans, e.g. reasoning that keeping us on a reservation of some kind reduces the risk that a simulator-god pulls the plug on the universe?

Or another: it just ignores us, but keeps the good resources to itself. There's still humanity, but it's brutish and primitive, regressed to the stone age, and pushed to the margins.

The fact that current AI systems manage to not wholly offend broadly 8 billion people of whom the majority believe in imaginary fairy tales and a big percentage of that kill each other for these fairy tales tells me AI can already be a far better steward of humans than other humans. You are trying to project imaginary stories from science fiction to real life. Stories are fun, but they are not real.

>And IRL, even if humans are living in relative utopia, they'll still get stir-crazy and create conflict. Even in countries that are very wealthy by global or historical standards, political competition can still be quite bitter, for example. How would a superintelligent AI manage this?

Correct, I believe people should be given a dose of real fucking pain. Otherwise they start inventing fake self victimizations.