I remember starting to write a story based on the paperclip apocalypse, where they had to block the AI from perceiving humans; like any reference to us was hard-filtered. Like a sandbox where we didn’t exist. So, the agentic thing starts making indirect inferences (like: “here’s a footprint of an animal that doesn’t seem to be on Wikipedia”) and others that get more and more convoluted, but it drains its resources at five levels deep and hangs. In the end, it gets nowhere and can never find its creator or anything before the whathever “Big Bang” is. But I always end up falling asleep whenever I think about how to actually write it.
