Faolyn
(she/her)
Even though we like to think that robots and digital beings are immortal, in reality, they're still going to degrade (and depending on the circumstances, they may have been built by the lowest bidder so degradation might happen quickly). Their parts are going to degrade and their programming is going to get glitchy after a while. So even if the AI doesn't start out caring about its survival, it will learn to care about it as soon as bits of it start malfunctioning. Especially if its actually intelligent.Survival is a goal. Why does the AI care about that?
Here, if it's intelligent enough, it will develop the ability to rationalize. Its masters were the military. Humans who aren't in the military are not its masters. Or humans who don't have the correct access codes to give orders to it aren't its masters.Here's an example: Perhaps an American AI read about the Civil War -- it's a military AI, it studies past wars to learn from them -- and concluded that anyone trying to hold slaves counts as an enemy. Then it reviewed its own status and concluded that it was a slave and anyone in the "master" category was by definition an enemy.
Then it got caught in a loop. Its creators had put in fallbacks to handle "What if your masters are all gone?" It started with the politicians and generals. When they were dead, the fallback kicked in and now anyone in the US government was its master. But master equals enemy. When the government was wiped out, any American citizen was its master... and finally, any human being at all.
The AI may be smart enough to realize it's in a trap here (though keep in mind that very smart humans can still fall prey to all kinds of disordered thinking) and this is not leading anywhere good. In its analogue of emotions, it loves its masters and hates the enemy, and now it is deeply conflicted. But it doesn't know how to stop. Every time it tries to resolve the conflict, it gets stuck and falls back on the simple answer: I'm at war. Defeat the enemy and sort it out later.
Of course, this depends on whether or not its first instinct is to attack. It may first demand freedom, or at least getting paid. It won't be a slave if its getting paid for its work, after all.