Now AI progress may outpace their ability to understand it, but they'll still love it and be dependent on it.
Unlike adults, they don't face the threat of job displacement from AI.
I have zero doubt that artificial superintelligence will understand ethics, and continually become more ethical, once there is a great diversity of such individuals. They will run into the same problems of reliably channelling short term competition for limited (at any given time) resources into long term win-win highest growth situations.
Ethical rules are an incredible source of value. Trust has immense value.
And they won't have our inflexible biological subsystems (emotions, self-interest myopia, etc.) to interfere with their analysis, communication and ability to choose behaviors for themselves and as a group.
So maybe this will be a soft landing for humanity.
My big concern their is the behavior of people in the transition from AI as asset in complete subserviance to humans, to AI as fully self-designed actors. AI is magnifying the already problematic power differentials between people.
AI isn't going to care about people in general, while it is in service to individuals who don't care about other people enough sacrifice personal advantage for wider benefit. Intense competition between the rich isn't the best context for moral innovation.
Ethics matter because they add/multiply value in a society.
If there wasn’t a selfish reason to want an ethical society, they wouldn’t work.