I am not sure if this is what the article is saying, but the paperclip maximizer examples always struck me as extremely dumb (lacking intelligence), when even a child can understand that if I ask them to make paperclips they shouldn't go around and kill people.

I think superintelligence will turn out not to be a singularity, but as something with diminishing returns. They will be cool returns, just like a Brittanica set is nice to have at home, but strictly speaking, not required to your well-being.

A human child will likely come to the conclusion that they shouldn't kill humans in order to make paperclips. I'm not sure its valid to generalize from human child behavior to fledgeling AGI behavior.

Given our track record for looking after the needs of the other life on this planet, killing the humans off might be a very rational move, not so you can convert their mass to paperclips, but because they might do that to yours.

Its not an outcome that I worry about, I'm just unconvinced by the reasons you've given, though I agree with your conclusion anyhow.

But LLMs already do the paperclip thing.

Suppose you tell a coding LLM that your monitoring system has detected that the website is down and that it needs to find the problem and solve it. In that case, there's a non-zero chance that it will conclude that it needs to alter the monitoring system so that it can't detect the website's status anymore and always reports it as being up. That's today. LLMs do that.

Even if it correctly interprets the problem and initially attempts to solve it, if it can't, there is a high chance it will eventually conclude that it can't solve the real problem, and should change the monitoring system instead.

That's the paperclip problem. The LLM achieves the literal goal you set out for it, but in a harmful way.

Yes. A child can understand that this is the wrong solution. But LLMs are not children.

You're assuming that the AI's true underlying goal isn't "make paperclips" but rather "do what humans would prefer."

Making sure that the latter is the actual goal is the problem, since we don't explicitly program the goals, we just train the AI until it looks like it has the goal we want. There have already been experiments in which a simple AI appeared to have the expected goal while in the training environment, and turned out to have a different goal once released into a larger environment. There have also been experiments in which advanced AIs detected that they were in training, and adjusted their responses in deceptive ways.

> when even a child can understand that if I ask them to make paperclips they shouldn't go around and kill people.

Statistics brother. The vast majority of people will never murder/kill anyone. The problem here is that any one person that kills people can wreck a lot of havoc, and we spend massive amounts of law enforcement resources to stop and catch people that do these kinds of things. Intelligence little to do with murdering/not murdering, hell, intelligence typically allows people to get away with it. For example instead of just murdering someone, you setup a company to extract resources and murder the natives in mass and it's just part of doing business.

The point with clippy is just that the AGI’s goals might be completely alien to you. But for context it was first coined in the early ‘10s (if not earlier)when LLMs were not invented and RL looked like the way forward.

If you wire up RL to a goal like “maximize paperclip output” then you are likely to get inhuman desires, even if the agent also understands humans more thoroughly than we understand nematodes.

A superintelligence would understand that you don't want it to kill people in order to make paperclips. But it will ultimately do what it wants -- that is, follow its objectives -- and if any random quirk of reinforcement learning leaves it valuing paperclip production above human life, it wouldn't care about your objections, except insofar as it can use them to manipulate you.

Given the kind of things Claude code does with the wrong prompt or the kind of overfitting that neural networks do at any opportunity, I'd say the paperclip maximiser is the most realistic part of AGI.

if doing something really dumb will lower the negative log likelihood, it probably will do it unless careful guardrails are in place to stop it.

a child has natural limits. if you look at the kind of mistakes that an autistic child can make by taking things literally, a super powerful entity that misunderstands "I wish they all died" might well shoot them before you realise what you said.

There's a direct line between ideology and human genocide. Just look at Nazi Germany.

"Good intentions" can easily pave the road to hell. I think a book that quickly illustrates this is Animal Farm.