But why stop there? Not only is there an entire planet to exploit (Earth), with a large quantity of matter to re-organize into paperclip factories, there are other planets in our solar system, plus numerous asteroids and moons. Ultimately, as Bostrom argues, if this rogue AI were sufficiently intelligent, it could end up “converting first the Earth and then increasingly large chunks of the observable universe into paperclips.”9 The example, of course, is frivolous. But the moral of the story is not. In contrast to a specialized AI, the intellectual compass of a superhuman-level artificial
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