The existing ontology that we have around consciousness is pretty unclear. A better understanding the nature of consciousness and thus what's valuable will likely come with new ontology.
When it comes to reasoning around statistics, robustness of judgements, causality, what it means not to Goodhart it's likely that getting better at reasoning also means to come up with new ontology.
Regardless of the details, we ought to prioritize taking all of our power plants, water purification stations, and nuclear facilities out of the world-wide-web.
I think it's very questionable, to make major safety policy "regardless of the details". If you want to increase the safety of power plants, listening to the people who are responsible for the safety of power plants and their analysis of the details, is likely a better step instead of making these kind of decisions without understanding the details.
Orcas already seem to have language to communicate with other orcas. Before trying to teach them a new language, it would make more sense to better understand the capabilities of their existing language and maybe think about how it could be extended to communicate with them about what humans want to talk about with them.
It's quite easy to use Pokemon playing as feedback signal for becoming better at playing Pokemon. If you naively do that, the AI would learn how to solve the game but doesn't necessarily train executive function.
A task like doing computer programming where you have to find a lot of different solutions is likely providing better feedback for RL.
What is the chance that these octopuses (at the point of research scientist level) are actively scheming against us and would seize power if they could?
And the related question would be: Even if they are not "actively scheming" what are the chances that most of the power to make decisions about the real world gets delegated to them, organizations that don't delegate power to octopuses get outcompeted, and they start to value octopuses more than humans over time?
What do you mean with 'must'? The word has to different meanings in this context and it seems bad epistemology not to distinguish them.