Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer

Labour productivity, by economic definition, is the ratio of output to people. If most of the wealth generation in an organization is automated, labour productivity will be high, whereas if most of it is manual, labour productivity will be low, even when both organizations are producing the same amount of wealth.

A) I see no reason that 'being made up of units which are intelligent' ought to classify a system as intelligent.

B) I see no way in which you can usefully talk about anything without intentional behavior as a 'maximizing intelligence'.

You can't call 'capitalism' the 'driver of our economy' for the same reason you can't call 'ecology' the 'driver of natural selection' or 'conflict' the 'driver of our military conquests'. You are conflating a system with the units in the system, and talking about an ecology of intelligent units as if it is satisfying some behavioral utility function.

'Capitalism' doesn't have a utility function, because it doesn't have decision-making capacity, which is pretty much the only prerequisite for intelligent behavior. It doesn't drive our economy, it is our economy. The actors in the system are corporations and humans (and governments, unions, and a few other united organizational structures), therefore those are the things which can exhibit intelligence.

Actually, yes. Money is a lien on future production. Or demand rights. That's specifically what debt creates: an obligation to someone else for future efforts if the debtor.

No, not all money is debt in the sense that it's loaned into existence. But it does create a general expectation, and quite often a legal obligation, to accept it as payment. That is, any money-denominated debt is fulfilled by a credible offer to pay in cash (unless previously otherwise negotiated).

Even if simply printed into existence, money is a right of demand, that is, if I run a printing press and drop-ship you a pallet-wrapped billion in Benjamins, you've got equal rights to anyone else to bid that money against anyone else on goods or products.

Capital wealth is similar: it's a legal fiction (though an awfully well established one) that by right of claim to some property, the owner thus has other capabilities, including, significantly, collateral for debts, which can be used to provide liquid debts. Hocking a ring at a pawn shop, home equity loan, corporate paper, or the very significant sovereign debt available to holders of petrochemical resource claims or reserve currency authorities

Aside: which is among the reasons why there's much hay made over claims of personal worth, the solvency of reserve currencies, and over whether and to what extent petrochemical reserves might be stranded -- above and beyond merely comparing net worth, these determine access to loans from others. Donald Trump and oil companies / oil-producing nations are notably testy about the first and second, much of the noise eminating from RT (and much echoed through ZeroHedge) are based on concerns over access to capital (Trump, Oil) and in weakening the dollar and through that, the United States' access to credit markets.

Since definitions of what property is are determined by law, precedent, force of arms, etc., you'll also see a lot of resorting to that as well.

But yes: money is ultimately a created fiction, a universally exchangeable good, whose fundamental supply is unlimited, a reality constrained largely by the fact that increasing its supply without restraint does lead to a dimunution in the exchange value of units currently in existence, and all instruments denominated in currency amounts (e.g., debts, bonds, contracts, etc.). Each individual currency unit is a demand on future production, though the increment of that demand is not itself fixed for all time (inflation/deflation).

There's more on this concept in Modern Monetary Theory. My own thoughts are independently conceived, but I'm finding it's quite similar.