I thought that hitting a precaution is a penalty in its utility function. I must be missing something.
I'm assuming this is just a deontological rule along the lines, "If X happens, shut down." (If the Programmer was dumb enough to assign a super-high utility to shutting down after X happens, this would explain the whole scenario - the AI did the whole thing just to get shut down ASAP which had super-high utility - but I'm not assuming the Programmer was that stupid.)
Today's post, Failed Utopia #4-2 was originally published on 21 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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