The AI Takeover Has Arrived - The Honest Sorcerer

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The AI Takeover Has Arrived<br>...but it looks completely different from what we imagined

The Honest Sorcerer<br>May 29, 2026

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Drone surveillance. Image by flysight<br>Hah! You thought that one really dark day AI would suddenly rise to consciousness, take over the world and turn us into paper clips—or worse: battery cells? Wrong! It won’t do any of that. It doesn’t need to. Before going into details why is that so, however, I have to start with an admission. I seriously underestimated AI and the speed of its development. I always thought that large language models are just that: blathering machines with nothing useful to say—other than hallucinating summaries and images of what real people once wrote, said or made pictures of. The past few months have really changed my worldview, though. I’ve seen demonstrations, presentations, participated in round table discussions on the topic and learned a lot. Things I imagined never to become real or possible have been revealed to me. Even AI experts had to confess they underestimated the speed with which these changes have arrived. The transformation the world is going through is both truly remarkable and frightening at the same time. It’s no exaggeration to say that we have arrived at a juncture in human history, and our future looks more uncertain than ever.<br>Thank you for reading The Honest Sorcerer. If you value this article or any others please share and consider a subscription, or perhaps buying a virtual coffee. At the same time allow me to express my eternal gratitude to those who already support my work — without you this site could not exist.

The Paper Clip Fallacy

Let’s start our journey discovering what an AI future has in store for us with a popular story among existential risk analysts—because, well yes, there is such a thing. It goes like this:<br>“When the world ends, it may not be by fire or ice or an evil robot overlord. Our demise may come at the hands of a superintelligence that just wants more paper clips.”<br>Nick Bostrom

In 2014, Mr Bostrom, a philosopher who founded and directs the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, has created a thought experiment, which he called: “the paper-clip maximizer.” It works as follows:<br>“Imagine a machine programmed with the seemingly harmless, and ethically neutral, goal of getting as many paper clips as possible. First it collects them. Then. realizing that it could get more clips if it were smarter, it tries to improve its own algorithm to maximize computing power and collecting abilities. Unrestrained, its power grows by leaps and bounds, until it will do anything to reach its goal: collect paper clips, yes, but also buy paper clips, steal paper clips, perhaps transform all of earth into a paper-clip factory. “Harmless” goal, bad programming, end of the human race.”

As many other philosophical thought experiments it sounds plausible… Until you examine the core assumptions and realize that nothing of the sort could ever come to life. Yet, we are not safe either… As someone who worked 20 years in the world of manufacturing, supply chains and product engineering, I always felt obliged to disassemble this argument, but somehow never found the time and space to do so. Recent developments, I alluded to above, however, have forced me to do so.<br>First, you don’t program a machine to get as much paper clips as it can. You just don’t. Not even for fun. Companies, with ample resources to build and operate such a machine want to make profits—not paper clips. (And trust me, you wouldn’t feel better when your room would start to fill up with clips, either.) See, if you inundate the market with paper clips (or whatever) it’s price naturally falls, unless you are willing to invest into a massive warehouse storing those widgets (thereby starving the market). Either way you end up owning a huge investment, with no profits to show for it. A surefire way to bankruptcy.<br>Second, the world, the biosphere and the human economy in it, is full of feedback loops. Such thought experiments ignore all of that. That’s what makes them so sexy and attractive: they are simple, and contrary to their name, actually don’t require giving much thought to them. Otherwise, they would fall apart. Just as the paper-clip maximizer cited above. Should such an algorithm came into existence—against all odds—it’s activity would send metal and other raw material prices soaring. Shortages would appear, and people would suddenly notice that a crazy AI agent have started to steal, buy up and manufacture a ton of paper clips. What if companies then stopped delivering what the paper clip monster wanted? What if it could no longer do what it does because it runs out of a critical component? Would it start a war? Of course not. Or is it…?

Paper clips… Lots of paper clips. Image via Unsplash<br>The Real Risk

This little thought experiment, deeply flawed as it is, still...