But it nevertheless is a non-paperclip, even if only temporarily. It’s no different from a bit of newly-manufactured wire that could be bent into a paperclip but hasn’t been yet, or a bit of liquid metal ready to be loaded into a paperclip-shaped mold.
We don’t have a fully-specified printout of Clippy’s utility function. It could be that unbent paperclips are just a little annoying, or that extruded unbent wire is much better than kittens.
Also an unbent paperclip can be easily rebent to paperclip-ness. So it hasn’t undergone information theoretic destruction.
But it nevertheless is a non-paperclip, even if only temporarily. It’s no different from a bit of newly-manufactured wire that could be bent into a paperclip but hasn’t been yet, or a bit of liquid metal ready to be loaded into a paperclip-shaped mold.
We don’t have a fully-specified printout of Clippy’s utility function. It could be that unbent paperclips are just a little annoying, or that extruded unbent wire is much better than kittens.