Thought experiment:
Through whatever accident of history underlies these philosophical dilemmas, you are faced with a choice between two, and only two, mutually exclusive options:
* Choose A, and all life and sapience in the solar system (and presumably the universe), save for a sapient paperclipping AI, dies.
* Choose B, and all life and sapience in the solar system, including the paperclipping AI, dies.
Phrased another way: does the existence of any intelligence at all, even a paperclipper, have even the smallest amount of utility above no intelligence at all?
If anyone responds positively, subsequent questions would be which would be preferred, a paperclipper or a single bacteria; a paperclipper or a self-sustaining population of trilobites and their supporting ecology; a paperclipper or a self-sustaining population of australopithecines; and so forth, until the equivalent value is determined.
The crypto here is a bit of a red herring; you want that in adversarial contexts, but a paperclipper may not necessarily optimize much for adversaries (the universe looks very empty). However, a lot of agents are going to research error-checking and correction because you simply can't build very advanced computing hardware without ECC somewhere in it - a good chunk of every hard drive is devoted to ECC for each sector and discs like DVD/BDs have a lot of ECC built in as well. And historically, ECC either predates the most primitive general-purpose digital computers (scribal textual checks) or closely accompanies them (eg. Shannon's theorem), and of course we have a lot of natural examples (the redundancy in how DNA codons code for amino acids turns out to be highly optimized in an ECC sense).
So, it seems pretty probable that ECC is a convergent instrumental technique.
E.g. proofreading in biology