Marshall I think that's a bit of a cop-out. People's lives are at stake here and you have to do something. If nothing else, you can simply choose to play defect, worst case the PM does the same, and you save a billion lives (in the first scenario). Are you going to phone up a billion mothers and tell them you let their children die so as not to deal with a character you found unsavory? The problem's phrased the way it is to take that option entirely off the table.
Yes, it will do evil things, if you want to put it that way. Your car will do evil things without a moment's hesitation. You put a brick on the accelerator and walk away, it'll run over and kill a little girl. Your car is an evil potential murderer. You still voluntarily interact with it. (unless you are carfree in which case congrats, so am I, but that's entirely irrelevant to my metaphor)
Besides that, what do you mean calling the PM chaotic? It's quite a simple agent that maximizes paperclips. You're the chaotic agent, you want to maximize happiness and fairness, love and lust, aesthetic beauty and intellectual challenge. Make up your mind already and decide what you want to maximize!
Followup to: The True Prisoner's Dilemma
For everyone who thought that the rational choice in yesterday's True Prisoner's Dilemma was to defect, a follow-up dilemma:
Suppose that the dilemma was not one-shot, but was rather to be repeated exactly 100 times, where for each round, the payoff matrix looks like this:
As most of you probably know, the king of the classical iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is Tit for Tat, which cooperates on the first round, and on succeeding rounds does whatever its opponent did last time. But what most of you may not realize, is that, if you know when the iteration will stop, Tit for Tat is - according to classical game theory - irrational.
Why? Consider the 100th round. On the 100th round, there will be no future iterations, no chance to retaliate against the other player for defection. Both of you know this, so the game reduces to the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma. Since you are both classical game theorists, you both defect.
Now consider the 99th round. Both of you know that you will both defect in the 100th round, regardless of what either of you do in the 99th round. So you both know that your future payoff doesn't depend on your current action, only your current payoff. You are both classical game theorists. So you both defect.
Now consider the 98th round...
With humanity and the Paperclipper facing 100 rounds of the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, do you really truly think that the rational thing for both parties to do, is steadily defect against each other for the next 100 rounds?