"If a superintelligence starts out with a friendly top goal, however, then it can be relied on to stay friendly, or at least not to deliberately rid itself of its friendliness. This point is elementary. A “friend” who seeks to transform himself into somebody who wants to hurt you, is not your friend."

Well, that depends on the wirehead problem - and it is certainly not elementary. The problem is with the whole idea that there may be something such as a "friendly top goal" in the first place.

The idea that a fully self-aware powerful agent that has access to its own internals can be made to intrinsically have environment-related goals - or any other kind of external referents - is a challenging and difficult one - and success at doing this has yet to be convincingly demonstrated. It is possible - if you "wall off" bits of the superintelligence - but then you have the problem of the superintelligence finding ways around the walls.