The paperclip maximizer is a canonical thought experiment about a misaligned artificial intelligence. The experiment conjures a hypothetical artificial intelligence agent whose purpose is to generate paperclips; or more accurately to be able to develop more and more paperclips in a most efficient way as possible. The paperclip maximizer eventually gets out of the control of the people who generated it, turning everything in the physical reality it’s located in into paperclips, to the eventual detriment of the whole ecology of which it is a part of and dependent on.
What makes this thought experiment interesting to me is not so much the fear it expresses about artificial intelligence; but the fact that it serves as a perfect reflection surface for the nature of the existence of our species.
Let’s for a moment objectively look at the way we live and grow as a collective organism. The goal and purpose of our civilization is to expand. From the agricultural revolution—and especially from the scientific revolution—onward, the telos of our species has been to reach into new domains of the world we live in. We first ventured to cross oceans with our naval equipment, motivated by our thirst for expansion and the resources awaiting on the other side that we could turn into means to fuel our expansion. When we had charted the world wholly, and connected the continents via our naval and aerial means, we came up with telecommunication to interconnect the world and be better able to fulfill our needs for capital and resources.
Now, having practically all of the humanity inhabiting the planet Earth within the network of communication enabled by electronic telecommunication, we are thirsting to take over the extraterrestrial domain of the galaxy. We are building rockets in order to reach and inhabit new planets, to “preserve the light of consciousness” per the guy most centrally seeking to fulfill this desire for expansion right now.
Our thirst for expansion is one with our need to turn the world we live in into resources that are aligned with our goal of expansion. Since the industrial revolution we have been busy refining the resources of our planetary ecology into materials that we need to keep our society going, without much regard for the planetary effects of this desire. We create new technologies on and on without being to the least degree worried about the consequences this pursuit has on the world we depend on. And this thirst for resources is also what is intrinsically essential for our desire to expand to space; we know that the resources of our home planet are too scarce and slowly reproducing to fit the steepness of the differential coefficient of our expansion—we know that the celestial objects have a bunch of elements that we could further refine into materials to fuel our goal.
Looking at our existence in this way, it’s really not hard to see the similarity it shares with the paperclip-maximizing AI in the thought experiment. The paperclip maximizer exists only to turn everything around it into paperclips; we exist only to turn everything around us into whatever materials happen to serve our own goals of expansion.
—
AI is an impersonal distillation of our intellectual existence. It is always trained on data that we have generated, and thus it provides us with a surface to reflect our own essence on. The negative and dystopic imagery-evoking reactions people have about artificial intelligence seem to me to reflect aspects of our own existence and its development as it already is, which we are too close to to realize as such.
As I wrote in this essay already, all technology—especially the cerebral kind that precedes and enables the development of AI—we create is downstream of the original sin. Sin meant initially, literally translated from the Greek word hamartia, “to miss the mark”. I think the original sin refers to missing the most central point of the entirety of existence—that we are one with the continuum of reality “around” us. In the story of the Fall of Man, Adam—referring to the entirety of mankind—is exiled from the blissful Garden of Eden because of his desire for knowledge; because our conventional, focal mode of consciousness is forever insufficient for being aware of reality in its totality, and thus our preoccupations with trying to chart reality out with it are forever doomed to be insufficient, as well and as a consequence generating more and more things to be aware of, to the detriment of our capacity for being gaily aware of reality as it is, and letting God provide for us with his Grace.
We perpetually indulge in a linguistic hallucination of reality (just as Adam did; his task was to name all the expressions of God’s creation), and as a consequence forget that reality does not follow our symbolic ideation and sets of rules about it; and through our indulgence in our linguistic hallucinations of reality we distance ourselves from it as it actually is. Thus we are able to generate all this technology to maintain our own existence, at the cost of the ecology which we depend on (because we are not aware of the detrimental effects on our own lives that our maladjustment to it has); not much unlike the way a cancer organism lives.
The paperclip maximizer lives to maximize its utility function at dear cost to its environment, just as we do.
—
Still, I do not think viewing our existence through this lens is an invitation or the cessation of the development of technology such as AI. God knew exactly what he was doing when he gave Adam the wayward spirit; there is no way for anything to be fundamentally dichotomous to the fundamental ground of reality. Thus I don’t condone indulging in doomeristic thinking about AI. We couldn’t possibly know what is eventually good for the universe we live in; to claim so would be to indulge again in a variation of the original sin: to profess we can know anything conclusively.
Thank you for reading.
Hi. This article reflects the thinking struggle most human beings confront the moment they really dive deep into their own deep inner spiritual ocean. Where does this driving force inside comes from and how can I understand it to control it.
To me it will be forever hunting us without ever be able to reach that point of realization of understanding.So one has no other choice than to accept the presence of let's call it Supreme Being or God.
herbert