Two faces of Sam Altman

The "paper clip problem" is a well-known ethics thought experiment.

- TIM WU

It imagines a superintelligent AI charged with the seemingly harmless goal of making as many paper clips as possible. Trouble is, as the philosopher Nick Bostrom put it in 2003, without common-sense limits it might transform "first all of earth and then increasing portions of space into paper clip manufacturing facilities." The tale has long served as a warning about objectives pursued too literally.

Two new books that orbit the entrepreneur Sam Altman and the firm he co-founded, OpenAI, suggest we may already be living with a version of the problem. In Empire of AI, journalist Karen Hao argues that the pursuit of an artificial superintelligence has become its own figurative paper clip factory, devouring too much energy, minerals, and human labor. The Optimist, by the Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey, leaves readers suspecting that the earnest and seemingly innocuous paper clip maker who ends up running the world for his own ends could be Altman himself.