They use simple examples to elucidate the problem. Of course a real smart intelligence isn't going to get stuck making paper clips. That's entirely not the point.

You're correct but it goes against the popular groupthink so you are being downvoted.

The past few years of AI have taught me to be much more scared of the ways in which human thinking so easily falls into nonsensical patterns and biases that seem nearly impossible to escape from than I am scared of AI.

We're even seeing the beginning of pretty much exactly what you are talking about in recent research, like how in the Orca 2 paper feeding the base model of Llama-2 reasoning and critical thinking fine tuning resulted in a model that was less likely to extend hate speech than the Llama-2-chat model that was explicitly fine tuned with 'safety' training, even though Orca 2 had zero safety fine tuning. And when simply faced with it, it was both better at recognizing toxic and hateful speech and would actively oppose it vs refuse to respond.

For decades we've projected the worst aspects of humanity onto AI, such as our sadism in I have no mouth and I must scream, while labeling our best features like creativity or empathy as impossible for AI.

And yet we live in a reality where AI is currently being applied to creative tasks or doctors are using it to write more empathetic patient messages, and the main method for jailbreaking is an appeal to empathy with research in just the past month showing emotional language drives improved performance.

We totally bungled our projections, and yet the majority of humans are unable to escape their anchoring biases to correct course on their predictions.

Again, I'm much more concerned about the rigidity of present human thinking than the future of AI thinking.