AI and Aaronson’s Law of Dark Irony

The major developments in human history are always steeped in dark ironies. Yes, that’s my Law of Dark Irony, the whole thing.

I don’t know why it’s true, but it certainly seems to be. Taking WWII as the archetypal example, let’s enumerate just the more obvious ones:

• After the carnage of WWI, the world’s most sensitive and thoughtful people (many of them) learned the lesson that they should oppose war at any cost. This attitude let Germany rearm and set the stage for WWII.
• Hitler, who was neither tall nor blond, wished to establish the worldwide domination of tall, blond Aryans … and do so via an alliance with the Japanese.
• The Nazis touted the dream of eugenically perfecting the human race, then perpetrated a genocide against a tiny group that had produced Einstein, von Neumann, Wigner, Ulam, and Tarski.
• The Jews were murdered using a chemical—Zyklon B—developed in part by the Jewish chemist Fritz Haber.
• The Allied force that made the greatest sacrifice in lives to defeat Hitler was Stalin’s USSR, another of history’s most murderous and horrifying regimes.
• The man who rallied the free world to defeat Nazism, Winston Churchill, was himself a racist colonialist, whose views would be (and regularly are) denounced as “Nazi” on modern college campuses.
• The WWII legacy that would go on to threaten humanity’s existence—the Bomb—was created in what the scientists believed was a desperate race to save humanity. Then Hitler was defeated before the Bomb was ready, and it turned out the Nazis were never even close to building their own Bomb, and the Bomb was used instead against Japan.

When I think about the scenarios where superintelligent AI destroys the world, they rarely seem to do enough justice to the Law of Dark Irony. It’s like: OK, AI is created to serve humanity, and instead it turns on humanity and destroys it. Great, that’s one dark irony. One. What other dark ironies could there be? How about:

• For decades, the Yudkowskyans warned about the dangers of superintelligence. So far, by all accounts, the great practical effect of these warnings has been to inspire the founding of both DeepMind and OpenAI, the entities that Yudkowskyans believe are locked into a race to realize those dangers.
• Maybe AIs will displace humans … and they’ll deserve to, since they won’t be quite as wretched and cruel as we are. (This is basically the plot of Westworld, or at least of its first couple seasons, which Dana and I are now belatedly watching.)
• Maybe the world will get destroyed by what Yudkowsky calls a “pivotal act”: an act meant to safeguard the world from takeover from an unaligned AGI, for example by taking it over with an aligned AGI first. (I seriously worry about this; it’s a pretty obvious one.)
• Maybe AI will get the idea to take over the world, but only because it’s been trained on generations of science fiction and decades of Internet discussion worrying about the possibility of AI taking over the world. (I’m far from the first to notice this possibility.)
• Maybe AI will indeed destroy the world, but it will do so “by mistake,” while trying to save the world, or by taking a calculated gamble to save the world that fails. (A commenter on my last post brought this one up.)
• Maybe humanity will successfully coordinate to pause AGI development, and then promptly be destroyed by something else—runaway climate change, an accidental nuclear exchange—that the AGI, had it been created, would’ve prevented. (This, of course, would be directly analogous to one of the great dark ironies of all time: the one where decades of antinuclear activism, intended to save the planet, has instead doomed us to destroy the earth by oil and coal.)

Readers: which other possible dark ironies have I missed?