I think it would be beneficial if SIAI could define something that's scary (e.g. paperclip maximizer) given N sensors, M actuators, O operations per second, and P parallel threads, where for the sake of argument O and P can be very big (but not as big as needed for fully simulating universe).

Without this, the scary idea only exists in the fuzzy space of armchair philosophy. The paperclip maximizer as it is now, is not even an idea, just a sequence of letters from alphabet.