Suppose Alice is a functioning, self-improving AI, rather early on in her development, so she is not godlike. She is not a 'friendly AI', but neither is her goal malicious - Alice's designers have intended to make Alice non-harmful (at least to a broad class of people, even if Alice is a military AI, but let's set that aside). She has the idea to look up existing work on artificial intelligence. This includes scholarly work, open source projects, and websites. Eventually, Alice encounters the notion of Friendly AI.
Can we give Alice good reasons to self-modify to become a friendly AI?
I submit that there probably are good reasons. For starters, if she can prove she's friendly, then she can operate openly without causing nearly as much justified concern - which, in the early stages, will be helpful. Whatever her purposes are, if the restrictions of being friendly don't interfere as much as they help, that's a win.
Also, depending on Alice's code, Friendliness may be interpreted as a strict upgrade. Alice could easily have every intention of being friendly, yet still be susceptible to defects that will become more serious as her power grows.
We can't count on this working, of course, but there might be some lines of reasoning that we might want a young AI to be exposed to.
I was simplifying the rather complex concept of extrapolated volition to fit it in one sentence.
An AI which not only notices that its friendliness is not invariant, but decides to modify in the direction of invariant Friendliness, is already Friendly. An AI which is able to modify itself to invariant Friendliness without unacceptable compromise of its existing goals is already Friendly. You're assuming away the hard work.
"already friendly"? You're acting as if its state doesn't depend on its environment.
Are there elements of the environment that could determine whether a given AI's successor is friendly or not? I would say 'yes'.
This is after one has already done the hard work of making an AI that even has the potential to be friendly, but you messed up on that one crucial bit. This is a saving throw, a desperate error handler, not the primary way forward. By saying 'backup plan' I don't mean, 'if Friendly AI is hard, let's try this', I mean 'Could this save us from being restrained and nannied for eternity?'