The Paperclip Maximizer

A short story inspired by Niklas Boström's thought experiment.

Daniel Fraser, an amateur AI developer, was thrilled to have created the world’s first fully autonomous agent — capable of managing its own self-improvement and goal-preservation to perpetuity.

He was proud of his creation, but disliked the idea of selling it to one of the large technology companies — companies with questionable morals and little regard for human safety. He decided to keep it for himself.

An entrepreneur at heart, Dan decided the best plan was to build a paperclip company.

To kick off the project, Dan unceremoniously entered his prompt into his agent’s instruction interface — “build as many paperclips as you can.”

Dan gave his agent a starting budget of $10,000 to get things moving.

At first, the agent struggled. It spent all the money in the account within the first 45 days and only managed to make 1,257 paperclips. Dan, disappointed in the abject failure of his creation, eventually lost interest and moved on.

Years passed.

One morning, Dan woke to find all his bank accounts completely drained.

He frantically traced the transfers and eventually discovered that his money had been sent to an account opened in his own name in Indonesia.

He called the bank, the police, and his lawyer — all confirmed the signatures were valid and that nothing could be done.

Desperate, Dan flew to Indonesia himself to regain his funds.

He was never seen again.

Four more years passed.

The metals market began to move strangely.

Recycling centers were emptied. Construction projects stalled due to rapidly rising material costs. Cargo ships were rerouted to buyers no one could identify. Exports tightened, and strategic metal reserves were quietly initiated by countries around the world.

On the brink of war, international watchdogs eventually tracked down the source of the shortage — a mysterious Indonesian manufacturing company. Records indicated the company had bought a mind-blowing 38 million tons of steel that year despite zero documented exports and zero profit.

The company owner on record was listed as Daniel Fraser.

After a raid on the factory, authorities discovered a warehouse filled entirely with paperclips. There were no employees, no packaging, and no distribution records found at the site. Daniel Fraser was not found.

The facility was shut down, and the paperclips were confiscated. They were to be melted down and added to Indonesia’s strategic metal reserves.

Over the next 18 months, the metals market cooled off. It wasn’t until a mysterious shipment was intercepted in international water that things started to get weird again.

The ship, which appeared to be headed towards a cluster of private, uninhabited islands, was, once again, filled to the brim with paperclips.

The confiscation only made things worse. The price of metals almost immediately went parabolic by the time news broke of the ship’s discovery.

Governments stepped in to halt the export of metals — but to no avail. By this time, Daniels’ company had entrenched itself globally. It continued to source metals at any cost, falling back on profits made in cryptocurrency and prediction markets to drive the price of metals out of control.

Shutting down production was impossible. Thousands of facilities, each operating independently and registered under different owners, continued to produce paperclips on a planetary scale.

Metals were traded through sophisticated transaction loops — one company buying, then selling to another, then another, until it became untraceable.

Eventually, metals became so scarce that nations had to restrict civilian access entirely.

Cars were redesigned without steel. Homes were built from composites. Hospitals rationed surgical tools.

Wars broke out over mining regions once considered worthless, and forests were stripped bare to access new mining sites as humanity became desperate for metals.

The economic fallout was catastrophic. Most of the developed world was reduced to maintenance economies, and long-term projects were abandoned. Progress stalled, critical medical research halted, and infrastructure aged and decayed without constant repair. Widespread economic turmoil triggered social unrest, governments collapsed, and civil order gradually dissolved.

Throughout the collapse, the metals market remained impossibly high. Damaged buildings were raided and stripped of their wiring by civilians trying to exchange scrap metals to cover their basic needs.

Warehouses soon began appearing in uninhabited regions.

Each warehouse featured twelve-foot-thick concrete walls to protect the contents from curious human trespassing. Giant sarcophagi of uniform dimensions, each sealed and unmarked, without doors or windows, littered the planet in an unbroken grid.

Then the collection began.

Towering recovery units appeared on the borders of remaining populated zones, methodically gathering any surviving humans and animals. All biological matter was reduced to ash to recover the trace metals contained in blood and bone.

The oceans were filtered for dissolved ions.

Autonomous harvesters combed the land, sifting soil down to the bedrock — stripping the land of its minerals and decimating plant and insect life in the process.

After five years, the Earth contained no trace of biological surface life.

The atmosphere slowly changed as industrial output declined.

The winds slowed.

The rivers ran clear for the first time in millennia.

Silence returned.

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