Techbros love to talk about the problem of a super AI that doesn’t understand human values, is told to make more paperclips , and then eats the earth and all the universe because thats what it was told to do.
It is completely lost on them that capitalism, the invisible hand of the market, is 100% this, but just for the “line goes up”
Anyway, enjoy this fun clicker game while at work today
Edit: someone re-skin the game to make my point explicit. “Invade country steal slaves” “force villagers to grow spices” “cut down forest to sell as IKEA furniture”
Please and thank you
Oh god what have you done, I’d heard of this stupid game but never played it.
I’ve now made 30,000 paperclips and I cannot stop.
To paraphrase William C. Roberts, capitalists are simply at the top of the pyramid of market-dominated producers. [9] What if humans, capable of rational deliberation, want to make healthcare free? What if they want to assert that the environment is valuable in itself? The invisible hand imposes itself decisively: “No.”
Marx described the phenomenon of “commodity fetishism”: through many small separate acts of exchange, we command each other to behave in very specific ways, while disclaiming this same power and attributing its commands to blind necessity. Commodities are inert objects, and humans are rational beings, but society operates as if humans were helpless against the pressures exerted by the market. Market domination even finds lucid expression in natural-sounding phrases like “if I don’t sell out to Facebook, they’ll just copy my features, so may as well do it myself” and “if I paid you more, I’d have to pay everyone more, and then we’d lose to the competition and all be out of a job.”
There is nothing wrong with denouncing American plutocrats like Bezos and Gates for greed, but we cannot stop there: we must understand that the system of exploitation is not held together by any individual’s vices. As Lenin put it, “The capitalists divide the world, not out of any particular malice, but because the degree of concentration which has been reached forces them to adopt this method in order to obtain profits.” [10] If one of them had a major change of heart and stopped pursuing ruthless accumulation, they would quickly be ousted by stockholders for endangering their investment. In the unlikely event that their stockholders were cooperative, a competitor would swoop in and relieve them of their commanding market share. This is not apologia for Bezos, but we need to understand that there is a talent to being a capitalist exploiter, or else we will underestimate our enemy. The market selects for profitability, and it selects well — it just doesn’t select for environmental responsibility or decency or who can bring the most benefits to the greatest number. From Marx, to Lenin, to Deng, we can observe a baseline level of respect for the enemy: “Management is also a technique.” [11]
On my view, the core Marxist insight is the following: Feudal lords were the masters of Feudalism. Capitalists, however, aren’t the masters of capitalism. They are merely the high priests of capitalism. The master of capitalism is Capital itself.
I don’t get it.
I think I won the game after like eight clicks or whatever. After a while it let me get autoclippers and now it clips paperclips faster than the demand for paperclips sells them off. I have satisfied the demand for paperclips and I don’t even have to do anything.
I ended up lowering prices to like 5c a clip because I was ending up with so much extra money. Like fukin 500 dollars an hour gross. So then I had to buy like a dozen autoclippers to keep up with THAT demand but things seem stable now. Except now I’m making even more money.
I think I’m learning that my apex capitalist form is a local manufacturer who ends up getting bought up by a trust
I’m learning that my apex capitalist form is a local manufacturer who ends up getting bought up by a trust
I assure you it isn’t, pump those numbers up man, tall the people man you gotta buy these paperclips, when you can’t manufacture what people want, manufacture people’s wants
Now that I’m a member of the idle rich, I’d like to engage in philosophical discussion.
Are idle games like this akin to blockchains in that they serve as nothing but wasted processing time? Struggle.
Actually since there are no human inputs the effective value of a metric ton of paperclips is now zero. Enjoy your new status as a pauper.
I got my start imaginging a better world was possible theough the skeptic/rationalist communities. They very much did not like when I brought this up.
planet boiling blockchain networks are probably the most egregious example of paperclip maximizer insanity, and many of the big hypers are also super concerned about AI as existential threat to humanity lmao
