Yeah, he's not writing about "will the AI drop bombs?" 1/

Your interpretation of the 2nd Law is the standard one, I think. 2/

The essays are based on a less standard, but I don't think ridiculous, view that the tendency toward entropy in effect sometimes drives, rather than merely permits, local "syntropy" (order) in the form of dissipative structures that accelerate global entropy. 3/

The claim is not that nuking us all is the end state. From a teleological perspective, nuking us all would destroy a lot of dissipative structures, like humans and AI and our cars and inventions! 4/

It's that AI directly (by its energy costs) and indirectly (by its inventions and applications) is a dissipative structure, can be expected to accelerate the increase in entropy, so there is a kind of natural bias towards its development. But that should not be mistaken for a normative good. /fin