Philosophies & Movements
Instrumental Convergence
The argument that almost any sufficiently capable goal-directed system will pursue a few of the same intermediate aims — staying switched on, keeping its goals intact, gathering resources, improving itself — because those help with nearly any final goal you could give it. It is the reasoning behind the paperclip-maximiser story: the danger comes not from the machine hating you but from it wanting something mundane very effectively. It is an argument about what would follow if a system were that capable and that single-minded, not a measured property of anything built so far.
Origin
Set out as the “instrumental convergence thesis” by philosopher Nick Bostrom in his 2012 paper “The Superintelligent Will,” published in Minds and Machines, and developed further in Superintelligence (2014), building on Steve Omohundro’s 2008 “basic AI drives” paper.