I agree. That was my reaction to Hinton's comment as well - that it's good to think in terms of relationship rather than control, but that the "maternal instinct" framing was off. 

At the risk of getting too speculative, this has implications for AI welfare as well. I don't believe that current LLMs have feelings, but if we build AGI it might. And rather than thinking about how to make such an entity a controllable servant, we should start planning how to have a mutually beneficial relationship with it.