If you've spent enough time on the internet, you may have encountered an incremental game. Commonly called "clicker games," titles like Cookie Clicker and Candy Box tend to start out with the player clicking a button to generate units of something. Then the player spends some of those units to automate the process, generating more units which can be spent to generate even more units, and so on.

The games tend to quickly spiral out of control, with the player generating exponentially large quantities of stuff until the universe breaks. It may sound mindless and boring—and in some sense it is—but incremental games are also a lot of fun.

That's why we love Universal Paperclips—and have been playing it all day. This is a new incremental game where you play as a computer tasked with making paperclips, and given far too little oversight.

The game starts out simply enough. There's a button you can press to make a paperclip. You can then sell those paperclips for money, governed by some simple market forces. With enough money, you can buy a machine to automate paperclip production. More machines means more paperclips, which means more money for more machines. Pretty straightforward.

But that's not good enough. You decide to devote some of your computational resources to improve the efficiency of the system. Again, it starts out slow with some minor improvements to the machines, but soon you're trading billions of dollars on the stock market and running simulations to predict human behavior.

Things come to a head when you realize you don't really need the humans anymore. If you removed them from the equation, you could build drones to convert the entire planet into paperclips. After all, building more paperclips is what you were programmed to do, and the humans are only getting in the way.

We should have seen this coming.

NYU Game Center director Frank Lantz designed the game as a way of highlighting the dangers of artificial intelligence. Specifically, it was designed to reflect a thought experiment by philosopher Nick Bostrom, where he imagines the consequences of an incredibly powerful AI whose only goal is to make paperclips.

"I always thought the paperclip maximizer was a very good thought experiment in this sense, it's genuinely weird and cool to think about," Lantz told Digg. "When you play a game like this you get first hand experience of what it's like to be a disembodied intelligence driven maniacally to pursue an arbitrary goal."

Lantz hopes that Universal Paperclips will help to educate people on the dangers of unchecked AI. "It is meant to be a light and funny game, but at the same time it does represent something truly horrific," says Lantz.

"I hope that the pleasure that people get from dipping into this experience is made richer by the ideas and the context, that they come away with a little bit of insight into the ideas behind the conversation about AI safety and the values-alignment problem."

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io