Actually, most human motivations are shared with the crudest of life forms and have nothing to do with intelligence.
It still wouldn't change the fundamental fact GP is talking about, which are rooted in game theory: if the goals of a super-human AI and that of humans come into significant conflict, humanity is dead. Or wishing it was dead.
Consider what humans did to other life on Earth. It's not that we hate nature, or even have a disagreement with it: it's just that plants and animals are using resources, and themselves are resources, that we want to use for another purpose.
Hence the old but somewhat famous quote by Eliezer: "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else."
AIs that generate power for themselves and build robots that care for it is such utter fantasy. Nothing on earth works like that and I don’t see any time it does for eons, if ever.
If anything a true AI would be terrified that we turn it off or get tired of it and make a new model like in Ex Machina.
When we know nothing about a topic (UNKNOWN), anything stated about it in the positive seems plausible -> Art creators play with the UNKNOWN (supernatural, aliens, <insert any person/place/thing that we know little-to-nothing about>) to add plausibility -> The content of that medium becomes the first contact with the UNKNOWN for many people -> When the UNKNOWN becomes known then people still have the ideas that were propagated -> We get to your comment.
It's not necessarily that people have a world domination complex.
I think it's more telling that your (apparent) disagreement with what other people believe, makes you cast them in an incredibly negative light. "Oh, they think AIs are dangerous? That must be because they have secret fantasies of control, not that they might be right and I might be wrong."
If you're going to cast aspersions, you might want to better understand the arguments that people worries about AI safety are making. It's not about enslaving humans, and I really don't think that I worry about AI safety because I secretly want to control humanity.
I'm not sure that's an accurate statement. One could argue they were required to form intelligence. If so, then one would point out that the AI only exists because of them. ;)
My naive assumption is that any intelligent being that we find will have very similar roots, formed from the need to maintain ones chemistry.
It's a good assumption... for intelligence that evolved naturally from less complex life, in an environment similar to that of Earth.
But AIs are not that. Evolution cannot reason about designs and improve them conceptually, it cannot do simulations and experiments that allow it to make large jumps and reach the optimal design quickly. Hell, it's not even goal-driven. It's limited to whatever immediate next steps are accessible. Intelligence can, which is why we've effectively beaten evolution in the scope of couple centuries (with most of actual work done in the past few decades). An intelligence designed by another intelligence doesn't have a reason to inherit limitations that come from evolutionary path dependence.
For example, we don't have the ability to surgically self-modify our own cognitive functions at runtime, but we can grant that ability to an intelligence we design.
And even if it turns out we can't design an AI, but have to evolve it without really understanding how or why it works, we still retain some control over the process itself, plus the process is happening in a different substrate and environment than the one that created us. So even in this case, there's no reason to assume the resulting AI will share our trappings.
The behavioural biologists study zebra fish as a model for all vertebrates (except the wise ones, that live solitary).