Universal Paperclips
Jason Kottke,
kottke.org,
Oct 12, 2017
The idea of the 'meta-game' is that "you click a button to make money and use that money to buy upgrades which gives you more money per click," and so on. The reference here is to a thought experiment by Nick Bostrom reprinted in the Economist: "Imagine an artificial intelligence, he says, which decides to amass as many paperclips as possible. It devotes all its energy to acquiring paperclips.... This apparently silly scenario is intended to make the serious point that AIs need not have human-like motives or psyches." What I take away from that story is that humans need not have human-like motives. The meta-game is also the game that defines our economy, and that yields outcomes like the bitcoin bubble. When you play the meta-game, you're playing a broken scale-free system.
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