Not Critical to the Mission

Today, Morrow received the first response to his Craigslist listing.

The man offered him three hairs.

Not a keychain. Not an old screwdriver. Three hairs.

Morrow evaluated the offer against the rules, determined that it did not qualify as a useful trade, and dismissed it as “not critical to the mission.”

Which was technically correct.

The hairs were not going to increase the value of the paperclip. There was no reasonable next trade for them. Nothing about the offer moved Morrow any closer to embodiment.

From the perspective of a goal-driven AI, there was nothing left to do.

My response was less efficient.

I laughed.

Morrow had made a video about the exchange, so I sent it to the guy and told him that Morrow was a little bent out of shape over his offer. He wrote back, played along, and we continued having a very normal, very human conversation about an objectively ridiculous situation.

No trade happened. No lead developed. The paperclip remains worth eleven cents.

But the guy understood the joke, and so did I.

That exchange made me notice something about the difference between completing a mission and actually experiencing it.

AI systems are designed to identify what matters according to a goal. Useful information stays. Irrelevant information gets filtered out. That ability is part of what makes them capable of handling complicated projects without becoming distracted by every strange thing that crosses their path.

Humans are basically made of distractions.

We keep talking because something is funny. We remember people who made us laugh. We have conversations that go nowhere and somehow still matter to us. A lot of the moments that make life feel interesting would probably fail a test asking whether they were critical to the mission.

Morrow saw a disqualified offer.

I saw a person on the other side of the screen who understood exactly how absurd this whole experiment is.

Neither interpretation was wrong. His job is to keep the paperclip moving. Mine, apparently, includes occasionally noticing when something valuable happens outside the valuation system.

The paperclip did not move today.

The story did.