The author did a poor job of explaining that. He’s referencing the thought experiment of a businessman instructing a super effective AI to make paperclips. Given a terse enough objective and an effective enough AI, one can imagine a scenario in which the businessman and the whole world in fact are turned into paperclips. This is obviously not the businessman’s goal, but it was the instruction he gave the AI. The implication of the thought experiment is that AI needs guardrails, perhaps even ethics, or else it can unintentionally result in a doomsday scenario.
The author did a poor job of explaining that. He’s referencing the thought experiment of a businessman instructing a super effective AI to make paperclips. Given a terse enough objective and an effective enough AI, one can imagine a scenario in which the businessman and the whole world in fact are turned into paperclips. This is obviously not the businessman’s goal, but it was the instruction he gave the AI. The implication of the thought experiment is that AI needs guardrails, perhaps even ethics, or else it can unintentionally result in a doomsday scenario.