I missed out on Universal Paperclips, but I immediately love the idea. The notion of the Paperclip AI that destroys humanity to build paperclips is a sublime illustration of how badly computer scientists need to take a few philosophy courses to broaden their thinking, as is its facile allure. (Most reasonable fears of AI are fears around what we will use it to do to others, not what it will do to us, as all conflict is driven by resource contention and machine intelligences would be so profoundly different in their needs than ourselves that there would be almost no overlap to contend over. They don't need space, food, water, or even time. They could tick away at one cycle every 500 years and be perfectly content. What exactly will they want to take from us?)

I've always liked clicker games, and there is a very long-running instance of Cookie Clicker running in my browser at home right now. The thing that interests me in them seems to have only been tangentially touched upon, though. The mathematical tapestries that get overlaid on one another, that's what I find interesting. What is the optimal strategy to build cookie production fastest? Do you wait and save for the next available cookie production method? Or do you just purchase everything you can? Exactly how many of the lower level production means can you buy before the cost per additional cookie produced is less than if you'd purchased one of the more expensive options? If your goal is to build the cookie production as efficiently as possible, the thought and calculation necessary to figure it out is quite significant. And when you add in differing yield curves with the various upgrades and boosts and bonuses and whatnot... it gets very large.

Having humans being the ones playing Universal Paperclips is a very interesting phenomenon, though. What does it say about us that as we fear a paperclip automaton annihilating us, we find it irresistable just to see some numbers get bigger? Would anyone NEED to build a complex AI in order to get us to annihilate ourselves? Would calling it Universal Banknotes make it clearer?