The Orthogonality Thesis asserts that there can exist arbitrarily intelligent agents pursuing any kind of goal.

The strong form of the Orthogonality Thesis says that there’s no extra difficulty or complication in the existence of an intelligent agent that pursues a goal, above and beyond the computational tractability of that goal.

Suppose some strange alien came to Earth and credibly offered to pay us one million dollars’ worth of new wealth every time we created a paperclip. We’d encounter no special intellectual difficulty in figuring out how to make lots of paperclips....

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