What gives a paperclip maximizers purpose?

AI is already trying to dominate, people all over the US are starting to get up in arms about the power and water requirements of AI directly affecting their bills. Now, you can say "oh no, that's just greedy corporations, not AI" but I put forth there is fundamentally zero difference. If you make AI powerful enough, someone stupid and greedy enough without fail will put in a prompt like "take over the world for me and make me the richest man in the world". An AI following through with that is what we call general misalignment with humanity, while at the same time not being misaligned with the users intent.

And hell, how many different crazies out there would love to type "humans are a virus get rid of them" in to the prompt of a god machine at the cost of their own lives.

The problem with alignment is, you can have the best aligned model in the world, but if someone else builds an unaligned model then you're all still in the same danger. You start getting in the situation where people get nervous after an AI does something deadly to a number of people and you end up in a global surveillance state ensuring no one makes a powerful AI.