"Pet", "vermin", and "wild animal" (as well as "livestock" and "working animal") are all concepts that humans have come up with for our species' relationships with other species that we've been living with since forever, and have developed both instincts and cultural practices to relate to. Why would you expect them to apply to an AI's relationship to humans? Isn't that a bit, well, anthropomorphizing?
Isn't that a bit, well, anthropomorphizing?
Indeed it is, a bit. This is just an analogy meant to convey that humans aren't likely to stop a foomed AI (or maybe a group of them, if such a term will even make sense) from doing what it wants, just like animals are powerless to stop determined humans.
The project of Friendly AI would benefit from being approached in a much more down-to-earth way. Discourse about the subject seems to be dominated by a set of possibilities which are given far too much credence:
Add up all of that, and you have a great recipe for enjoyable irrelevance. Negate every single one of those ideas, and you have an alternative set of working assumptions that are still consistent with the idea that Friendly AI matters, and which are much more suited to practical success:
The simplest reason to care about Friendly AI is that we are going to be coexisting with AI, and so we should want it to be something we can live with. I don't see that anything important would be lost by strongly foregrounding the second set of assumptions, and treating the first set of possibilities just as possibilities, rather than as the working hypothesis about reality.
[Earlier posts on related themes: practical FAI, FAI without "outsourcing".]