You can make all sorts of things sound unlikely by listing sufficiently long conjugations.
Premise 5 (P5): A paperclip maximizer wants to guarantee that its goal of maximizing paperclips will be preserved when it improves itself.
By definition, a paperclip maximizer is unfriendly, does not feature inherent goal-stability (a decision theory of self-modifying decision systems), and therefore has to use its initial seed intelligence to devise a sort of paperclip-friendliness before it can go FOOM.
The paperclip maximizer could tamper with itself with limited understanding, accidentally mutating itself into a staple maximizer. If it isn’t confident in its self modification abilities, its incentivised to go just fast enough to stop humans shutting it down. Maybe it suspects it will fail, but a 1% chance of turning the universe into paperclips, and 99% of turning it to staples, is better than whatever other options are available. Maybe the first AGI is only kind of agentic. GPT5 writing AI code, where GPT5 doesn’t care what the utility function is, so long as the code looks like something humans might write.
You can make all sorts of things sound unlikely by listing sufficiently long conjugations.
The paperclip maximizer could tamper with itself with limited understanding, accidentally mutating itself into a staple maximizer. If it isn’t confident in its self modification abilities, its incentivised to go just fast enough to stop humans shutting it down. Maybe it suspects it will fail, but a 1% chance of turning the universe into paperclips, and 99% of turning it to staples, is better than whatever other options are available. Maybe the first AGI is only kind of agentic. GPT5 writing AI code, where GPT5 doesn’t care what the utility function is, so long as the code looks like something humans might write.