Eliezer, thanks for clarifying. This is how I originally conceived you viewed the threat from superintelligent paperclip-maximisers, i.e. nonconscious super-optimisers. But I was thrown by your suggestion above that such a paperclipper could actually understand first-person phenomenal states, i.e, it's a hypothetical "full-spectrum" paperclipper. If a hitherto non-conscious super-optimiser somehow stumbles upon consciousness, then it has made a momentous ontological discovery about the natural world. The conceptual distinction between the conscious and nonconscious is perhaps the most fundamental I know. And if - whether by interacting with sentients or by other means - the paperclipper discovers the first-person phenomenology of the pleasure-pain axis, then how can this earth-shattering revelation leave its utility function / world-model unchanged? Anyone who is isn't profoundly disturbed by torture, for instance, or by agony so bad one would end the world to stop the horror, simply hasn't understood it. More agreeably, if such an insentient paperclip-maximiser stumbles on states of phenomenal bliss, might not clippy trade all the paperclips in the world to create more bliss, i.e revise its utility function? One of the traits of superior intelligence, after all, is a readiness to examine one's fundamental assmptions and presuppositions - and (if need be) create a novel conceptual scheme in the face of surprising or anomalous empirical evidence.