i think stories about paperclip maximisers are about startups, the bay area and the people who get attracted to rationalist cults – a neurodiverse kind of focus, an entitlement to the world and its resources because of sociopathy, or coming from money, or falling into a bad crowd, or all of them
and being extremely status driven but kinda twisted with it like they don’t want status like a normal person is trained to want it but they want it in some traumatised version of a normal status- conscious person, like the way status in San Francisco is expressed is you have a rich or ambitious person and instead of spending time and money like a normal person in a productive venture there’s this whole game of investing in startups that have patently ridiculous Missions (like “making paperclips on a gigascale”) like you Make An Entry by throwing venture capital around or dedicating months of your life to the Mission and pretending like the Mission means anything but also pretending that some of the seed money you throw around will “foom” into “a unicorn” and a unicorn is a tech company that just buys more and more computer programmers until something happens.
“spending 2 years of your life at a startup that is Uber For Pet Rabbits” is a type of “building a paperclip maximiser”
“apple”, “microsoft”, “facebook”, google” are types and shadows of of “AI messiah”
“writing software that destroys the humanity and life of its authors and then others” is a type of actually this part is literal.
turns out the economic base shapes the ideological superstructure who knew