Terminal goal vs Intelligence

Humans face a version of this all the time - different contradictory wants with different timescales and impacts.  We don't have and certainly can't access a legible utility function, and it's unknown if any intelligent agent can (none of the early examples we have today can).

So the question as asked is either trivial (it'll depend on the willpower and rationality of the agent whether they optimize for the future or the present), or impossible (goals don't work that way).

Another way of conceptualising this is to say that the agent has the single unchanging goal of "cups until 2025, thenceforth paperclips".

Compare with the situation of being told to make grue cups, where "grue" means "green until 2025, then blue."

If the agent is not informed in advance, it can still be conceptualised as the agent's goal being to produce whatever it is told to produce — an unchanging goal.

At a high enough level, we can conceive that no goal ever changes. These are the terminal goals. At lower levels, we can see goals as changing all the time in service of the higher goals, as in the case of an automatic pilot following a series of waypoints. But this is to play games in our head, inventing stories that give us different intuitions. How we conceptualise things has no effect on what the AI does in response to new orders.

It is not clear to me what any of this has to do with Orthogonality.