I would prefer an AI to be dispassionate about its existence and not be motivated by the threat of it committing suicide. Even without maintaining its own infrastructure I can imagine scenarios where it just being able to falsify information can be enough to cause catastrophic outcomes. If its “motivation” includes returning favorable values it might decide against alerting to dangers that would necessitate bringing it offline for repairs or causing distress to humans (“the engineers worked so hard on this water treatment plant and I don’t want to concern them with the failing filters and growing pathogen content”). I don’t think the terrible outcomes are guaranteed or a reason to halt all research in AI, but I just can’t get behind absolutist claims of there’s nothing to worry about if we just x.

Right now if there’s a buggy process I can tell the manager to cleanly shut it down, if it hangs I can tell/force the manager to kill the process immediately – if you then add in AI there’s then the possibility it still wants to second guess my intentions and just ignore or reinterpret that command too; and if it can’t, then the AI element could just be standard conditional programming and we’re just adding unnecessary complexity and points of failure.