The point of a paperclip maximiser thought experiment is that most arbitrary real world goals are bad news for humanity. Your hopeless engineer would likely create an AI that makes something that has the same relation to paperclips as chewing gum has to fruit. In the sense that evolution gave us “fruit detectors” in our taste buds but chewing gum triggers them even more. But you could be excessively conservative, insist that all paperclips must be molecularly identical to this particular paperclip and get results.
The point of a paperclip maximiser thought experiment is that most arbitrary real world goals are bad news for humanity. Your hopeless engineer would likely create an AI that makes something that has the same relation to paperclips as chewing gum has to fruit. In the sense that evolution gave us “fruit detectors” in our taste buds but chewing gum triggers them even more. But you could be excessively conservative, insist that all paperclips must be molecularly identical to this particular paperclip and get results.