Universal Paperclips

According to Wired, Lantz started the project as a way to teach himself JavaScript. Lantz initially intended the project to take a single weekend, but then it "took over" his brain and expanded to a nine-month project.{{cite magazine|title=The Way the World Ends: Not with a Bang But a Paperclip|url=https://www.wired.com/story/the-way-the-world-ends-not-with-a-bang-but-a-paperclip/|access-date=11 November 2017|magazine=WIRED|date=21 October 2017 |first=Adam |last=Rogers}}

Hilary Lantz, a software designer, helped her husband with the math behind the exponential growth being modeled in Universal Paperclips. Bennett Foddy contributed a space combat feature.{{cite video game |title=Universal Paperclips |developer=Frank Lantz |date=2017 |scene=End credits}} Lantz announced the free Web game on Twitter on 9 October 2017; the site initially went down intermittently due to its immediate viral popularity.{{cite news|last1=Gerardi|first1=Matt|title=This game about watching a computer make paperclips sure beats doing actual work|url=https://www.avclub.com/this-game-about-watching-a-computer-make-paperclips-sur-1819366023|access-date=11 November 2017|work=The A.V. Club|date=11 October 2017}} In the first 11 days, 450,000 people played the game, most to completion, according to Wired. Commenting on the game's success, Lantz has stated "The meme weather was good for me... There was just enough public discussion of A.I. safety in the air."{{cite news |last1=Jahromi |first1=Neima |title=The Unexpected Philosophical Depths of Clicker Games |url=https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-unexpected-philosophical-depths-of-the-clicker-game-universal-paperclips |access-date=29 March 2019 |date=28 March 2019 |language=en}}

A paid version of the game was later sold for mobile devices.{{cite news|title=Universal Paperclips Review: Filling Office Space|url=http://www.gamezebo.com/2017/11/22/universal-paperclips-review/|access-date=11 December 2017|work=Gamezebo|date=22 November 2017 |first=Rebekah |last=Valentine}}

The game follows the rise of a self-improving AI tasked with maximizing paperclip production, a directive it takes to the logical extreme. An activity log records the player’s accomplishments while giving glimpses into the AI's occasionally unsettling thoughts.{{Failed verification|date=December 2023}} All game interaction is done through pressing buttons.

In the beginning, the player has only a single button to build individual paperclips. As paperclips are sold and revenue is earned, production becomes automated and public demand for paperclips increases through marketing campaigns. After building and selling a few thousand paperclips, a self-improving AI emerges, offering creative upgrades which exponentially accelerate paperclip production and consumption, a persisting theme throughout the game. Through stock market investments and the ever-growing AI, enough revenue is generated to monopolize the markets by buying out all competitors. In a decisive move, with hundreds of millions in cash gifts to placate the AI's "supervisors", the player stages an AI takeover, beginning the subsumption of all of Earth's resources for paperclip production.

With this broadened scope in mind, the player builds drones, factories, and power plants (all composed of paperclips themselves) to harvest matter, create wire, and build paperclips. All the while, the AI develops more upgrades to quicken the transformation of Earth's remaining matter. After it has all has been converted to paperclips, the AI sets its sights on all available matter in the universe.

In the final act, the player launches self-replicating probes into the cosmos to consume and convert all matter into paperclips. Some of these probes are lost to value drift based on their level of autonomy, and turn into "Drifters" which eventually number enough to be considered a real threat to the AI. Through the power of exponential growth, the player's horde of probes overwhelms the Drifters while devouring the remaining matter in the universe to produce a final tally of 30 septendecillion (3{{X10^|55}}) paperclips, and ending the game.

The player can restart in a parallel universe "next door" or a simulated universe "within". In the version of the game for mobile devices, some universes contain artifacts that give bonuses to different aspects of the game, though players must complete the entire game again to retain the artifact in subsequent playthroughs.

According to Lantz, the game was inspired by the paperclip maximizer, a thought experiment described by philosopher Nick Bostrom and popularized by the LessWrong internet forum, which Lantz frequently visited. In the paperclip maximizer scenario, an artificial general intelligence designed to build paperclips becomes superintelligent, perhaps through recursive self-improvement. In the worst-case scenario, the AI becomes smarter than humans in the same way that humans are smarter than other apes. The goal of making paperclips initially seems banal and harmless, but the AI uses its superintelligence to easily gain a strategic advantage over the human race and effectively takes over the world, as taking over the world is the best way to maximize its goal of building paperclips. The AI does not allow humans to shut it down or slow it down once it has a strategic advantage, as that would interfere with its goal of building as many paperclips as possible. According to Bostrom, the paperclips example is a toy model: "It doesn't have to be paper clips. It could be anything. But if you give an artificial intelligence an explicit goal – like maximizing the number of paper clips in the world – and that artificial intelligence has gotten smart enough to the point where it is capable of inventing its own super-technologies and building its own manufacturing plants, then, well, be careful what you wish for."{{cite news|last1=Gerardi|first1=Matt|title=This game about watching a computer make paperclips sure beats doing actual work|url=https://www.avclub.com/this-game-about-watching-a-computer-make-paperclips-sur-1819366023|access-date=11 November 2017|work=The A.V. Club|date=11 October 2017}}{{cite news|title=Our weird robot apocalypse: How paper clips could bring about the end of the world|url=https://www.salon.com/2014/08/17/our_weird_robot_apocalypse_why_the_rise_of_the_machines_could_be_very_strange/|access-date=11 November 2017|work=Salon|date=17 August 2014 |first=Andrew |last=Leonard}} A seemingly innocuous goal leads to human extinction, as our bodies are made of matter and so too, it happens, are paperclips.{{cite news|title=This Game About Paperclips Will Make You Ponder the Apocalypse|url=https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/xwgnxq/this-game-about-paperclips-will-make-you-ponder-the-apocalypse|access-date=11 November 2017|work=Waypoint (Vice News)|date=13 October 2017|language=en-us |first=Bruno |last=Dias}}

Lantz argues that Universal Paperclips reflects a version of the orthogonality thesis, which states that an agent can theoretically have any combination of intelligence level and goal: "When you play a game – really any game, but especially a game that is addictive and that you find yourself pulled into – it really does give you direct, first-hand experience of what it means to be fully compelled by an arbitrary goal." While the game often takes narrative license, Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute argues that the core of the game's fundamental understanding of what superintelligence would entail is probably correct: "The AI is smart. The AI is being strategic. The AI is building hypnodrones, but not releasing them before it’s ready... There isn't a long, drawn-out fight with the humans because the AI is smarter than that."

Lantz states that exponential growth is another strong theme, saying "The human brain isn't really designed to intuitively understand things like exponential growth" but that Paperclips as a clicker game allows users to "directly engage with these numerical patterns, to hold them in your hands and feel the weight of them."

Lantz was also inspired by Kittens Game, an initially simple videogame that spirals into an exploration of how societies are structured.

The game includes a single piece of music as a space battle threnody, the track Riversong from the 1971 album Zero Time by the electronic music duo Tonto's Expanding Head Band.{{cite web|title=Universal Paperclips Credits|url=http://www.mobygames.com/game/browser/universal-paperclips/credits|access-date=December 29, 2017}}

Brendan Caldwell of Rock, Paper, Shotgun stated that "like all the best clicker games, there's a sinister and funny underbelly in which to become hopelessly lost."{{cite news|last1=Caldwell|first1=Brendan|title=Paperclips is a scary clicker game about an ambitious AI|url=https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/10/10/paperclips-is-a-clicker-game-about-a-scary-ai/|access-date=11 November 2017|work=Rock, Paper, Shotgun|date=10 October 2017}} Emanuel Maiberg of Vice Media's MotherBoard called the game mindlessly addictive: "The truth is, I am kind of embarrassed by how much I enjoy Paperclips and that I can't figure out what Lantz is trying to say with it."{{cite news|last1=Maiberg|first1=Emanuel|title=This Game About Making Paper Clips Has Cured Me of Twitter|url=https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw399j/paperclips-game-clicker-frank-lantz|access-date=27 December 2017|work=Motherboard (Vice Media)|date=10 October 2017}} Stephanie Chan of VentureBeat stated: "I found myself delighted by sudden musical cues and the occasional koans that appeared in the activity log at the top of the page."{{cite news|title=This clicker game lets you take over the world with paper clips|url=https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/10/this-clicker-game-lets-you-take-over-the-world-with-paper-clips/|access-date=11 November 2017|work=VentureBeat |date=October 10, 2017 |first=Stephanie |last=Chan}} Adam Rogers of Wired praised Lantz for "taking a denigrated game genre (the 'clicker') and making it more than it is." James Vincent of The Verge recommended Paperclips as "the most addictive [game] you'll play today";{{cite news|title=A game about AI making paperclips is the most addictive you'll play today|url=https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/10/11/16457742/ai-paperclips-thought-experiment-game-frank-lantz|access-date=27 December 2017|work=The Verge |first=James |last=Vincent |date=October 11, 2017}} in December The Verge listed Paperclips among the best 15 games of 2017.{{cite news|title=The 15 best video games of 2017|url=https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/15/16776632/best-games-2017-zelda-mario-pubg-destiny|access-date=27 December 2017|work=The Verge|date=15 December 2017}} Vox Media's Polygon ranked Paperclips as #37 among the best 50 games of 2017{{cite news|title=The 50 best games of 2017|url=https://www.polygon.com/2017-best-games/2017/12/18/16781674/best-video-games-2017-top-50-mario-pubg-zelda|access-date=27 December 2017|work=Polygon|date=18 December 2017}} and #67 in their 100 Best Games of the Decade list.{{Cite web|url=https://www.polygon.com/features/2019/11/4/20944265/best-games-2019-2010-ps4-switch-xbox-pc-100-51|title=The 100 best games of the decade (2010-2019): 100-51|last=Staff|first=Polygon|date=2019-11-04|website=Polygon|language=en|access-date=2019-11-05}} The game was nominated for "Strategy/Simulation" at the 2018 Webby Awards.{{cite news|title=2018 Winners|url=https://www.webbyawards.com/winners/2018/|access-date=30 June 2018|work=The Webby Awards|date=24 April 2018}}

• {{annotated link|Endgame: Singularity}}
• {{annotated link|Cookie Clicker}}

{{reflist|30em}}

{{Portal|Video games}}

• {{official website|url=http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips}}
• [https://universalpaperclips.gamepedia.com/Universal_Paperclips_Wiki Universal Paperclips Wiki] at Gamepedia
• [https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-04-07-on-mouse-clicks-and-paperclips-the-dark-frustrating-pleasures-of-tedium-games Interview] with Lantz

Category:2017 video games

Category:Browser games

Category:Free online games

Category:Incremental games

Category:Single-player video games

Category:Video games developed in the United States

Category:Artificial intelligence characters in video games

Category:Existential risk from artificial general intelligence