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CarlShulman comments on Is a paperclipper better than nothing? - Less Wrong Discussion
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This is a different and cleaner question, because it avoids issues with intelligent life evolving again, and the paperclipper creating other kinds of life and intelligence for scientific or other reasons in the course of pursuing paperclip production.
I would say that if we use a weighted mixture of moral accounts (either from normative uncertainty, or trying to reflect a balance among varied impulses and intuitions), then it matters that the paperclipper could do OK on a number of theories of welfare and value:
Paperclippers are worse than nothing because they might run ancestor simulations and prevent the rise of intelligent life elsewhere, as near as I can figure. They wouldn't enjoy life. I can't figure out how any of the welfare theories you specify could make paperclippers better than nothing?
Would it be possible to estimate how /much/ worse than nothing you consider a paperclipper to be?
Replace "paperclip maximizer" with "RNA maximizer." Apparently the long-term optimization power of a maximizer is the primary consideration for deciding whether it is ultimately better or worse than nothing. A perfect paperclipper would be bad but an imperfect one could be just as useful as early life on Earth.
And:
Desires and preferences about paperclips can be satisfied. They can sense, learn, grow, reproduce, etc.
Do you take that personally seriously or is it something someone else believes? Human experience with desire satisfaction and "learning" and "growth" isn't going to transfer over to how it is for paperclip maximizers, and a generalization that this is still something that matters to us is unlikely to succeed. I predict an absence of any there there.
Yes, I believe that the existence of the thing itself, setting aside impacts on other life that it creates or interferes with, is better than nothing, although far short of the best thing that could be done with comparable resources.
This is far from obvious. There are definitely people who claim "morality" is satisfying the preferences of as many agents as you can.
If morality evolved for game-theoretic reasons, there might even be something to this, although I personally think it's too neat to endorse.
But they can also be unsatisfied. Earlier you said "this can cut both ways" but only on the "hedonistic welfare theories" bullet point. Why doesn't "can cut both ways" also apply for desire theories and objective list theories? For example, even if a paperclipper converts the entire accessible universe into paperclips, it might also want to convert other parts of the multiverse into paperclips but is powerless to do so. If we count unsatisfied desires as having negative value, then maybe a paperclipper has net negative value (i.e., is worse than nothing)?