[earthboundkid]

Like all scifi, "Paperclip Maximizer" is just a fable about something that already happened but you put it in the future to make it seem more interesting. (E.g. robots are just slaves; space colonization is just regular colonization; Weyland-Yutani is just the East India Company; World War 3 is just WW2; etc.)

Capitalism has always been the paperclip maximizer, for better or worse. Why did Europeans drag a bunch of Africans across the ocean to America? Well, there's this thing called "money" and Europeans were trying to maximize it, and it turned out that getting cheap labor to work in the Americas would let you trade stuff to China and collect money in Europe. It makes no actual goddamn sense, but it maximized numbers, so it happened.

[ben_w]

Slavery ended because human values made it end. A paperclip optimiser doesn’t have human values.

[earthboundkid]

Slavery ended because human beings (the slaves) made it end. They revolted constantly, and the threat of revolt wasn't worth the money savings. No European wanted another Hati, so that was the beginning of the end. In the case of the US, after the Civil War had begun, slaves fled to the Union camps in large numbers, which forced the Union to emancipate and enlist them.

Anyway, capitalism doesn't have human values. Nor do nations. Human beings have human values, and we have to band together to impose those values on the various collectives that oppress us… but then because we've banded together, that band becomes the new form of oppression! So it goes.

[BlueTemplar]

There's a theory that slaveowners were just outcompeted by machine owners...

[earthboundkid]

Machines don't make you stop doing slavery. If anything, the forces go the other way: slavery was dying in the US at the end of the 1700s (slavery had been legal in the North too but was being abolished slowly) then the cotton gin made it suddenly hugely profitable in the South and gave it a big boost.

[BlueTemplar]

Hmm, what about outcompeting militarily?

[MR4D]

I don’t disagree, but technology have now given us a near-zero cost of duplicating that paperclip, so both the growth rate and practical upper bound are much higher than we’ve ever imagined before.