Friendliness may be hard for philosophical reasons, but beyond a certain level of software sophistication (goals in terms of an objective reality, can model humans) it's probably not that hard to have AI that has non trivially-bad goals and won't become significantly smarter than you until you agree it's safe. The problem with just studying safe AIs for a while (or working for a few years on improving humans, or trying to maintain the status quo) is that eventually an idiot or a bad guy will make a smarter than human intelligence.

So my favorite backup plan would be disseminating information about how to not catastrophically fail and trying to finalize a FAI goal system quickly.