Destructive alignment issues in our species are more mundane. Several leaders in the 20th century killed outright very large numbers of people for completely banal reasons like political ambition. Actually, your intuition that 9/11 events happen “all the time” is only off in a temporal sense; the number of humans unambiguously killed by the coordinated actions of relatively few other unaligned humans in the last 100 years is so great that it is probably enough to have at least one 9/11 a day during that time. Humans are generally unaligned on several levels from personal to egregoric and the only reason this is lately becoming a problem in a species-risk sense is because only now are we getting some powerful technology. A more probable version of the scenario in this post is a suicidal leader triggering a large scale nuclear war through use of their own arsenal either through deception or after taking steps to reduce the possibility of refusal. Of course it would be a great irony if now that global thermonuclear war is actually tested, the opposing forces are unable to make use of their deterrent.
Agreed. Look at the wars of just the past 100 years, the Spanish flu, and the damage caused by ignorant statements of a few famous or powerful people during the COVID-19 pandemic. We start to see a picture where a handful of people are capable of causing a large amount of damage, even if they didn’t anticipate it. If they set their mind to it, as probably with the Ukraine war at the moment, then the amount of destruction is very asymmetrically proportioned to the number of people responsible for it.
Destructive alignment issues in our species are more mundane. Several leaders in the 20th century killed outright very large numbers of people for completely banal reasons like political ambition. Actually, your intuition that 9/11 events happen “all the time” is only off in a temporal sense; the number of humans unambiguously killed by the coordinated actions of relatively few other unaligned humans in the last 100 years is so great that it is probably enough to have at least one 9/11 a day during that time. Humans are generally unaligned on several levels from personal to egregoric and the only reason this is lately becoming a problem in a species-risk sense is because only now are we getting some powerful technology. A more probable version of the scenario in this post is a suicidal leader triggering a large scale nuclear war through use of their own arsenal either through deception or after taking steps to reduce the possibility of refusal. Of course it would be a great irony if now that global thermonuclear war is actually tested, the opposing forces are unable to make use of their deterrent.
Agreed. Look at the wars of just the past 100 years, the Spanish flu, and the damage caused by ignorant statements of a few famous or powerful people during the COVID-19 pandemic. We start to see a picture where a handful of people are capable of causing a large amount of damage, even if they didn’t anticipate it. If they set their mind to it, as probably with the Ukraine war at the moment, then the amount of destruction is very asymmetrically proportioned to the number of people responsible for it.