For some reason this reminds me of the "effective altruism" movement (if you can call it a movement).
this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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One good thing AI bubble did: it showed me we have so many rich idiots that it is an actual problem
I couldn't finish the article. what a nincompoop.
Oh no, not this fiend again...
Are AI and AGI the same now? Is there a new theory of "just has to be big enough"? That would explain americas self-destructive planning of datacenters.
I for one would immediately switch on an AGI, i think even a 20% probability for a benevolent AGI is acceptable, compared with what humanity is doing.
AGI is always AI, but AI isn't always generally intelligent. AI is the parent category that AGI is a subcategory of. It's like the difference between the terms "plant" and "dandelion." All dandelions are plants, but not all plants are dandelions.
Any new technology is subject to the same problems under capitalism, specifically maximising profits to the detriment of anything else. This is especially bad with centralised tools. An AGI wouldn't just magically take global control.
I love how all these tech bros seem to forget that Capitalism exists, whenever they're babbling on about how AI is going to "solve everything". They conveniently forget that 99% of us are not going to be receiving any benefit from the monetization of this technology.
Well it all depends on your perspective of what "everything" is that needs solving.
His 2014 book Superintelligence was an early examination of AI’s existential risk. One memorable thought experiment: An AI tasked with making paper clips winds up destroying humanity because all those resource-needy people are an impediment to paper clip production.
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.
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.
Nick Bostrom takes himself waaaaaaaayyy too seriously.