A Viral Game About Paperclips Teaches You to Be a World-Killing AI

The idea of a paperclip-making AI didn't originate with Lantz. Most people ascribe it to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University and the author of the book Superintelligence. The New Yorker (owned by Condé Nast, which also owns Wired) called Bostrom "the philosopher of doomsday," because he writes and thinks deeply about what would happen if a computer got really, really smart. Not, like, "wow, Alexa can understand me when I ask it to play NPR" smart, but like really smart. In 2003, Bostrom wrote that the idea of a superintelligent AI serving humanity or a single person was perfectly reasonable.