I'm not being facetious in bringing this up, just attempting to point out that a computerised version of intelligence may not look much like the activities it replaces.
I think Dijkstra said it best "The question of whether computers can think is no more interesting than the question of whether submarines can swim."
Think of an AI machine working with atmospheric data as one "sense" combined with seismic data and some others, with the directed goal of predicting certain types of disasters (tsunamis...?).
Free will and emotions are other assumption we would likely not give these machines, so the worry of self-interest may not exist either, which would aid in making it good at something useful for us.
That doesn't mean that it won't have certain goals, though it remains to be seen whether it will be possible to design a clean goal system with a top-level goal (see also "Friendliness"). Humans clearly do not have this kind of goal system.
(By the way, humans, when asked directly for random numbers, are terrible at the task.)
Free will and emotions are other assumption we would likely not give these machines, so the worry of self-interest may not exist either, which would aid in making it good at something useful for us.
The question is, is it even possible to mimic human intelligence without emotion or free will? Who is to say they aren't wholly dependent on one another?
And if any group of people finds out how to imbue a machine with free will, I'd bet my life they'll go through with it.
An AI would make predictions based on data just like a human would, but the mechanism it used to do it would certainly be different.
Perhaps the parent actually was referring to the qualia component to emotion--or indeed qualia in general--which is much more difficult to explain.