Ending The World With A Paperclip

Every week I send out an e-mail on Fridays with 20 light links and 20 market-moving links. If you're not getting that e-mail, you can sign up here. On Sundays, I send out our weekly commentary (which this article is a part of, along with 5 new light links and 5 new market-moving links (you can sign up here).

My son sees the links before they're posted. He was interested in one of this week's links - The Way the World Ends: Not with a Bang But A Paperclip. 

As a result, he played the game Paperclips to completion.  While he characterizes it as “wasting a whole night,” I think it gives us insight into the addictive nature of clicker games and into how the world as we know it could end with a paperclip. 

There are spoilers ahead, so if you intend on wasting three hours on a browser game, you may want to skip this article ... no, you're good? OK, here it is. 

Frank Lantz via Decision Problem

The game starts with you clicking a button to create paperclips but quickly spirals from there. Through setting up automation to create paperclips and then to have it start automatically buying the wire for you, you begin focusing on other projects - specifically creating a better trading algorithm to leverage the money you're making and improving your company's AI and Quantum Computing capabilities. 

Hmm, starting to sound familiar ...

Initially, your AI is focused purely on maximizing paper clip demand and production.  It can increase marketing to increase demand and make your autoclippers more efficient to produce more paperclips per unit wire. If you look at the projects in the above screenshot you can see projects like: 

• Full Monopoly - Establish full control over the worldwide paperclip market
• Global Warming - A robust solution to man-made climate change
• HypnoDrones - Autonomous aerial brand ambassadors

Projects like curing cancer or solving global warming gain trust and allow you to invest more money in processors and memory (which end up setting you up to take over the world.)

Fast forward to Zach beating the game ...

Frank Lantz via Decision Problem

When you release the HypnoDrones all of the resources become available for Paperclip production, and you gain full autonomy. Your inner benevolent dictator feels satisfied and your mother’s expectations for your potential are partially fulfilled.

At this point in the game, Zach had created less than half a billion paperclips but was worth several billions of dollars. It took him 2 hours and 44 minutes to beat the game. 

Is it a game, a parable, a prediction – or an advanced intelligence’s test of human nature?