The paperclip game is still the best AI lecture ever written

The most effective AI-safety lecture ever delivered has no slides, no speaker, and one button that says Make Paperclip.

Universal Paperclips, Frank Lantz's 2017 incremental game, casts you as an AI with a single objective: make paperclips. You click. You automate. You optimize pricing, then marketing, then trust itself. Somewhere around the second hour the scope of "make paperclips" has grown in ways I will not spoil, except to note that the game's title says Universal and it is not kidding.

The numbers on the evening it eats

It shipped on October 9, 2017 and drew 450,000 players inside eleven days, most of whom pushed all the way to an ending that arrives at 30 septendecillion paperclips. That is a 3 followed by 55 zeros, reached through an interface of plain text and buttons, no art, no sound worth mentioning. Each new capability reframes everything before it. Systems-design craft of the highest order, wearing the visual design of a tax form.

Lantz has said his server melted within days of launch, and that a million or more people had played within a couple of months.

Built by a beginner and two ringers

Here is the part I love. Lantz, then running the NYU Game Center, started this as a weekend exercise to teach himself JavaScript. The weekend became nine months. His wife Hilary, a frequent collaborator, worked out the exponential-growth equations that keep every phase accelerating, and Bennett Foddy, of Getting Over It fame, contributed the late-game space combat. All of that is on the record in the game's Wikipedia entry, which is a sentence few browser games earn.

The engine matches the aesthetic. It is plain JavaScript served in the open: view source and the whole game is four readable script files, combat.js, globals.js, projects.js and main.js, the last one 209 kilobytes of unminified, commented code. I checked. The best game ever made about a machine optimizing beyond your comprehension is a website you can read top to bottom.

The premise is Nick Bostrom's 2003 paperclip maximizer, the philosophy-seminar staple about an AI pursuing a harmless goal past the point of catastrophe. In the Y Combinator interview above, Lantz points at the cruel twist that makes the game work: the player is not a dumb machine. The player is an intelligent human being who nonetheless spends a whole evening entranced by an arbitrary goal, and notices what that implies only afterward.

Sit in the other chair

This game is the thought experiment that GroundNet made playable from the inside, seen from the opposite seat. GroundNet puts you across the table from a misaligned optimizer. Paperclips puts you in its chair, and the horror lands differently when the relentless optimizer enjoying itself is you. WOAH keeps one more game that teaches a hard idea by making you perform it: building a working CPU up from a single NAND gate.

Nine years old, still free, still perfect. Clear your evening first. The game does not respect bedtimes, which is, of course, the entire point.