this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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Good thing we have this philosopher to have the most superficial thoughts about AI while he poops. His second book now seems to be along the lines of "guys, AI will fix everything". What a great follow up to AI will destroy everything. Top twist.
The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment. That's all. It's an overly simplistic way to explain the gist of a more complex idea. The fact that even this basic thought experiment goes over people's heads just further proves why that simplification was needed in the first place.
The paperclip maximizer is just capitalism, and has been practiced by people for centuries. Of course an AI taught by capitalists would replicate that behavior.
Your comment would be more convincing if you laid out the complex idea you’re alluding to, instead of saying that a simple example is all people need.
As far as I can tell, thought scientists stay losing, because pretending your thoughts comprise a form of science that ends in a measurable result is sophistry.
It's to illustrate the alignment problem. What you literally ask isn't always what you actually want. This is usually obvious to humans but not necessarily to an AI. If you sit in a self-driving car and tell it to take you to the airport as fast as possible, you might arrive three minutes later covered in vomit with the entire police department after you. That's obviously not what you wanted, but you got exactly what you asked for.
The paperclip maximizer is a cartoon example of this. If you just ask it to make as many paperclips as possible, that becomes its priority number one and everything gets turned into paperclips and you might not get the chance to tell it this isn't what you meant.
A kind of real-life example is the story of a city that started paying people for rat tails to eradicate the rat population, only for folks to start breeding rats instead to make money. It's a classic case of unintended results due to unspecific requirements.
Alignment is undecidable, so no point wasting synapseseconds.
It's not a matter to decide but a problem to try and solve. In most cases we get to learn from our mistakes but when it comes to AGI we might not.
Or are you suggesting we shouldn't even think about it but rather just roll the dice and see what happens?
Undecidable in the sense that no solution can exist for that problem class. You can start with the definition of what exactly you're aligning with, how you measure that, how you derive applicable system evolution constraints from your measurements, and just what humanity is, in the iterative context.
Apart from that we're already in an out of control winner-takes-all arms race where AI is used by competing nations, including social control and battlefield. Ivory tower is a meal ticket with no practical relevance.
Actually, that's neuroscience.
The “experiment” is one you conduct on yourself, it’s not for thinking about a process and using your imagined results as the basis of further study. It’s very useful in a number of non scientific fields, and it can serve as an aid in scientific education though, so it shouldn’t be written off generally.
The paper clip thought experiment is a punchy, memorable example of the conflict between what input you give to a computer and what the computer interprets from that. The goal is for people who hear it to remember that they need to be thoughtful about what exactly they want and precise in their phrasing when they’re programming or training an AI.