When talking about dealing and (non)interacting with real AIs, one is always talking about a future world with significant technological advances relative to our world today.

If we can formulate something as a question about math, physics, chemistry, biology, then we can potentially attack it with this scheme. These are definitely problems we really want to solve.

Its true that if we allow AIs more knowledge and more access to our world, they could potentially help us more -- but of course the number of things that can go wrong has to increase as well. Perhaps a compromise which sacrifices some of the potential while decreasing the possibilities that can go wrong is better.