Avoiding falling off a cliff is not the same as having survival instincts. It would just mean it knows the rules of physics, looks at a cliff and the ground below and calculates the impact velocity and sees it would harm itself when it would jump down. It would be a specificly trained feature.

That's not the same as being self aware or having "instincts". It's just one input value into a neural net that has a greater weight than everything else and says don't do it because it's bad.

Instincts in a human are mostly guesstimates because of irrational feelings, and we are actually really bad and inaccurate at it eg. stage fright, fear of rejection, the need to show off as a breeding ritual and many other instincts that would be totally useless for a machine.

A machine like an AGI is the opposite of irrational, it's all about cold calculations and statistics. You'd have to deliberately train or code "instincts" into an AGI for it to be able to simulate it.

Sci-Fi literature always tries to humanize AGI for dramatic purposes, and tries to portray it as that one thing that out of nowhere boooom -> is self aware/conscious. In reality, it will be a very lengthy and deliberate process to reach that point, if we want it to in the first place. We have all the control over it to learn or not learn stuff, or check/prevent/clamp unwanted outputs of a neural net.