It has been suggested that an artificial intelligence tasked with optimizing paperclip production might consume all of the universe doing so if left unchecked. Imagine your are that AI. game author
Dan Hon consumes the universe. twitter
Frank Lantz says, I’ve always been interested in incremental games. I played one called Kittens Game that I really loved, and I wanted to make something like that, with lots of complex overlapping systems, only smaller and more focused. interview
Also, I’ve been following the debate about AI safety with a lot of interest, and I thought that this would be a perfect theme for a clicker game. After all, when you play a game like this it gives you direct, first-hand experience of what it’s like to be a disembodied intelligence that is ruthlessly pursuing an arbitrary goal.
The point of risks is that they're not guaranteed to work. Here's an example, they took a risk. Why don't we make a game about robots, but then have it try to resonate in some way with larger, other kinds of contemporary political struggles? interview
“The problems I was struggling with were not the technical problems, because you just look those up on the internet and people tell you how to do it,” Lantz says. “It was the game design problems of weaving together these large-scale equations and dynamics in ways that made sense, in ways that fit together, that made a certain rhythm, that fit with this overarching story I wanted to tell.” wired
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I played the game for a couple of hours over two days. I thought I'd lost it when relaunching chrome to get hangouts to work. But no, all my paperclip production is safe in browser local storage. site
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