What do we gain from social interactions with dogs? ... Examples to support my "bare assumptions" are EASY to come by.

Happy to hear that. Because it then becomes reasonable to assume that you would not find it burdensome to share those examples. We are talking about benefits that a powerful AI would derive from social interactions with humans.

I hope you have something more than the implied analogy of the human-canine relationship. Because there are many other species just as intelligent as dogs with which we humans do not share quite so reciprocal a relationship. And, perhaps it is just my pride, but I don't really think that I would appreciate being treated like a dog by my AI master. ETA: And I don't know of any human dog-lovers who keep 6 billion pets.

Right. Many people here use the term "terminal" in the following sense (in this kind of context):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminalvalue(philosophy)

However, interpreting your comment in the light of such a definition apparently makes little sense.

So - presumably you meant something else - but what?

an AI would be human-foolish to take the stupid short-sighted shortcut of trashing us for no reason

You don't seem to understand how basic reasoning works (by LW standards). AFAICT, you are both privileging your hypothesis, and not weighing any evidence.

(Heck, you're not even stating any evidence, only relying on repeated assertion of your framing of the situation.)

You still haven't responded, for example, to my previous point about human-bacterium empathy. We don't have empathy for bacteria, in part because we see them as interchangeable and easily replaced. If for some reason we want some more E. coli, we can just culture some.

In the same way, a superhuman intelligence that anticipates a possible future use for human beings, could always just keep our DNA on file... with a modification or two to make us more pliable.

Your entire argument is based on an enormous blind spot from your genetic heritage: you think an AI would inherently see you as, well, "human", when out of the space of all possible minds, the odds of a given AI seeing you as worth bothering with are negligible at best. You simply don't see this, because your built-in machinery for imagining minds automatically imagines human minds -- even when you try to make it not do so.

Hell, the human-bacterium analogy is a perfect example: I'm using that example specifically because it's a human way of thinking, even though it's unlikely to match the utter lack of caring with which an arbitrary AGI is likely to view human beings. It's wrong to even think of it as "viewing", because that supposes a human model.

AI's are not humans, unless they're built to be humans, and the odds of them being human by accident are negligible.

Remember: evolution is happy to have elephants slowly starve to death when they get old, and to have animals that die struggling and painfully in the act of mating. Arbitrary optimization processes do not have human values.

Stop thinking "intellect" (i.e. human) and start thinking "mechanical optimization process".

[edit to add: "privileging", which somehow got eaten while writing the original comment]

Further, given the VERY minimal cost (if any) of cooperating with a cooperating entity

This premise is VERY flawed.