Perhaps one could give it a compulsion to optimize for paperclips, but I'd expect it to either put the compulsion on hold while it develops amazing fabrication, mining and space travel technologies, and never completely turn its available resources into paperclips since that would mean no chance of more paperclips in the future; or better yet, rapidly expunge the compulsion through self-modification.
As far as I can tell, that's what you're discussing, and so it sounds like you agree with him. Did I misread disagreement into this comment, or what am I missing here?
The section you quote allows for the possibility that an AI could be given a "compulsion" to optimize for paperclips, which it would eventually shrug off, whereas I am confident that an AI could be given a utility function that would make it actually optimize for paperclips.
This post is shameless self-promotion, but I'm told that's probably okay in the Discussion section. For context, as some of you are aware, I'm aiming to model C. elegans based on systematic high-throughput experiments - that is, to upload a worm. I'm still working on course requirements and lab training at Harvard's Biophysics Ph.D. program, but this remains the plan for my thesis.
Last semester I gave this lecture to Marvin Minsky's AI class, because Marvin professes disdain for everything neuroscience, and I wanted to give his students—and him—a fair perspective of how basic neuroscience might be changing for the better, and seems a particularly exciting field to be in right about now. The lecture is about 22 minutes long, followed by over an hour of questions and answers, which cover a lot of the memespace that surrounds this concept. Afterward, several students reported to me that their understanding of neuroscience was transformed.
I only just now got to encoding and uploading this recording; I believe that many of the topics covered could be of interest to the LW community (especially those with a background in AI and an interest in brains), perhaps worthy of discussion, and I hope you agree.