The author's thesis is that, since "airplanes don't fly like birds fly," defining AI by human imitation or servitude is really a provincial kind of speciesism. There's a very important distinction, however, between "acts human," "obeys humans," and "acts in the interest of humans," which the article glosses over.

While a strong AI wouldn't need to be designed expressly to mimic humans or slave at their bidding (what the author argues against), it would absolutely need to be programmed to respect, support, and further human needs. Almost any other way of designing a true AI, if it succeeds, results in instant extinction for humans. This is simply because if we are irrelevant, then we and our environment represent a useful source of raw material.

The simplest and most commonly cited example is the paper clip maximizer, which is seeded with making paper clips as its primary goal at some early stage of its development. Even after achieving superintelligence, it keeps that fundamental goal, and thus converts the solar system and whatever else it can access into a giant paper clip factory. (See http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Unfriendly_artificial_intelli... for more.)

Many have in fact argued that the only moral way to design a superintelligence is to imbue it with the desires of our more perfect selves. This theory is called Coherent Extrapolated Volition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligenc...), and the core idea is that the final goal of superintelligence should be whatever we ourselves would think of, if we were allowed to keep iteratively perfecting ourselves according to our current values until we reached a local maximum.

So while the article is interesting from an egalitarian perspective, the final issue comes down to this: any superintelligence had better be interested in us, because due to its immeasurably greater power, either it likes us or we're dead.