,, The “paper clip problem” is a well‑known ethics thought experiment in the world of artificial intelligence. It imagines a superintelligent A.I. 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,” the journalist Karen Hao, who has worked for The Wall Street Journal and contributes to The Atlantic, argues that the pursuit of an artificial superintelligence has become its own figurative paper clip factory, devouring too much energy, minerals and human labor. Meanwhile, “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.

“Empire of AI” is the broader and more critical of the two. Hao profiled OpenAI in 2020, two years before its most famous product, the intelligent chatbot called ChatGPT, debuted publicly. She portrays OpenAI and other companies that make up the fast‑growing A.I. sector as a “modern-day colonial world order.” Much like the European powers of the 18th and 19th centuries, they “seize and extract precious resources to feed their vision of artificial intelligence.” In a corrective to tech journalism that rarely leaves Silicon Valley, Hao ranges well beyond the Bay Area with extensive fieldwork in Kenya, Colombia and Chile.”(1)

Sources:

(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/books/review/empire-of-ai-karen-hao-the-optimist-keach-hagey.html

(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDQ0vZETJtE