The sticks are for things that are worse than sitting there doing nothing.
I figure boredom is like that - it has to work at the hedonic baseline - so it has to be a stick.
Is there potentially a best moment to tile the universe with? Could an AI be sure it had found the best moment?
Are its goals to find the "best moment" in the first place? It seems impossible to answer such questions without reference to some kind of moral system.
My mistake-- here's the original:
...So, if you lost the human notion of boredom and curiosity, but you preserve all the rest of human values, then it would be like… Imagine the AI that has everything but boredom. It goes out to the stars, takes apart the stars for raw materials, and it builds whole civilizations full of minds experiencing the most exciting thing ever, over and over and over and over and over again.
The whole universe is just tiled with that, and that single moment is something that we would find this very worthwhile and exciting to happen on
It makes for good Less Wrong introductory material to point people to, since there are lots of people who won't read long article online but will listen to a podcast on the way to work: LINK.
Apologies for the self-promotion, but it could hardly be more relevant to Less Wrong...