Humans are social creatures, and as such come with the necessary wetware to be good at predicting each other. Humans do not have specialized wetware for predicting AIs. That wouldn't be too much of a problem on its own, but humans have a tendency to use the wetware designed for predicting humans on things that aren't humans. AIs, evolution, lightning, etc.
Telling a human foreman to make paperclips and programming an AI to do it are two very different things, but we still end up imagining them the same way.
In this case, it's still not too big a problem. The main cause of confusion here isn't that you're comparing a human to an AI. It's that you're comparing telling with programming. The analog of programming an AI isn't talking to a foreman. It's brainwashing a foreman.
Of course, the foreman is still human, and would still end up changing his goals the way humans do. AIs aren't built that way, or more precisely, since you can't build an AI exactly the same as a human, building an AI that way has serious danger of having it evolve very inhuman goals.
The main cause of confusion here isn't that you're comparing a human to an AI. It's that you're comparing telling with programming.
Nope. An AI foreman has been programmed before I tell him to handle paperclip production.
AIs aren't built that way
At the moment AIs are not built at all -- in any way or in no way.
A stub on a point that's come up recently.
If I owned a paperclip factory, and casually told my foreman to improve efficiency while I'm away, and he planned a takeover of the country, aiming to devote its entire economy to paperclip manufacturing (apart from the armament factories he needed to invade neighbouring countries and steal their iron mines)... then I'd conclude that my foreman was an idiot (or being wilfully idiotic). He obviously had no idea what I meant. And if he misunderstood me so egregiously, he's certainly not a threat: he's unlikely to reason his way out of a paper bag, let alone to any position of power.
If I owned a paperclip factory, and casually programmed my superintelligent AI to improve efficiency while I'm away, and it planned a takeover of the country... then I can't conclude that the AI is an idiot. It is following its programming. Unlike a human that behaved the same way, it probably knows exactly what I meant to program in. It just doesn't care: it follows its programming, not its knowledge about what its programming is "meant" to be (unless we've successfully programmed in "do what I mean", which is basically the whole of the challenge). We can't therefore conclude that it's incompetent, unable to understand human reasoning, or likely to fail.
We can't reason by analogy with humans. When AIs behave like idiot savants with respect to their motivations, we can't deduce that they're idiots.