Yudkowsky gives the value of boredom as an example - as he did in value is fragile.

The problem here is that boredom is bound to be one of the basic AI drives. It will emerge as an instrumental value in practically any goal-directed intelligent system - since getting stuck doing the same thing repeatedly is a common bug that prevents agents from attaining their goals. If you have to do science, make technology, build spaceships, etc - then it is important to explore, and not to the same thing all the time - and goal-directed agents will realise that.

Of course, some things never get boring - even for humans. Food, sex, etc - but for the other things, you don't need to build boredom in as a basic value, a wide class of agents will get it automatically.

So, for example, a gold mining agent won't get bored of digging holes, but they will get bored doing unprofitable scientific research. Boredom is just nature's way of telling you that you have exhausted the local opportunities - and really should be doing something else.

Anyway, we don't have to worry too much about missing out things that will arise naturally through ordinary utility maximisation in a wide range of goal-directed agents. The idea that the universe will go up the tubes unless humans reverse-engineer boredom and manually program it into their machines is not correct. A wide class of machines that simply maximise utility will get boredom automatically - along with a desire for atoms, energy and space - unless we explicitly tell them not to assign instrumental value to those things.