The Unexpected Philosophical Depths of the Clicker Game Universal Paperclips

Not long after Lantz made Bostrom’s ideas playable, a young filmmaker named Alberto Roldán followed a link to the game on Facebook and was entranced. He contacted Lantz about making Universal Paperclips into a feature-length film. Roldán is close to finishing a draft of the script, and he has already curried the interest of several producers. His version will be much more explicitly peopled than the game itself is. “It has to involve characters who feel like it’s their story,” he told me. “As you play, you keep getting these increasingly large multimillion dollar gifts to sort of placate your ostensible keepers. We know who these characters are in our modern world: hyper-rich tech titans who are not super interested in questioning the thing that has enriched them—with the justification that they are healing the world at large.”

A year or two before the paperclip version came out I played a lot of AdVenture Capitalist (and it's sequel, wait for it, AdVenture Communist), was wondering to myself whether reinforcement learning researchers would find it interesting, and wondering if deep mind would start training up agents to compete in AdVenture Capitalist tournaments.